The Literary Club commenced with an orientation session introducing its mission, aims, and vision. The session familiarised members with the club’s proposed activities and emphasised the creation of an informal yet intellectually stimulating space for engaging with literature, cinema, music, and ideas beyond conventional classroom and research settings.

The club’s first screening featured The Truman Show, followed by a discussion exploring the film’s questions of reality, surveillance, performance, identity, freedom, and the construction of everyday life. Members reflected on how cinema can question the boundaries between the real and the artificial and examined the implications of the mediated self.

The session conducted the recitation of Seamus Heaney’s “From the Frontier of Writing” and Kaifi Azmi’s “Aurat”. The recitation was followed by a discussion which focused on diverse ideas ranging from art of poetry to womanhood. The session also included a recitation of Shabir Magami’s poetry.

The session explored the short fiction of Julio Cortázar through close readings of “Axolotl” and “The Continuity of Parks.” The discussion focused on shifting perspectives, unstable boundaries between reality and fiction, transformation, perception, and the uncanny movement between reader, character, and narrative world.

The session experimented with music as a medium of literary and emotional expression. Members recorded personal encounters or responses on slips of paper, which were then randomly drawn by other participants, who performed the emotions or experiences represented on them. The activity encouraged spontaneity, interpretation, empathy, and an exploration of how emotions can be communicated through performance.

The session engaged with three works by Franz Kafka: “On Metaphors”, “A Crossbreed”, “A Message from the Emperor,” “ A Hunger Artist”, “The Metamorphosis,” and “A Little Fable.” The readings opened discussions around alienation, transformation, bureaucracy, communication, isolation, and the absurd, while inviting members to consider Kafka’s distinctive treatment of the individual’s relationship with incomprehensible systems and realities.

Members gave live performances on various socially critical themes. The performances varied from domestic scenes, slam poetry, extempore, to collective role play.

The session brought literary and cinematic forms into conversation. Members read “Love” from Family Ties and “The Fifth Story” from The Foreign Legion, engaging with questions of narrative, identity, perception, and human relationships.

The session focused on the short story “The Earthquake in Chile.” Members engaged with the story through close reading and discussion, examining its treatment of crisis, vulnerability, human relationships, and the ways extraordinary circumstances can reveal unexpected dimensions of human behaviour and emotion.

The session explored Kashmiri writing in English through Zahid Rafiq’s short story “In Small Boxes,” from The World with Its Mouth Open. The reading opened a discussion on the literary representation of Kashmir, language, identity, and the possibilities of writing a distinctly Kashmiri experience in English.

The session featured a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, followed by discussion extending towards silence, identity, psychological fragmentation, performance, and the unstable boundaries between self and other.

In this session, members selected and shared three poems that held particular significance for them. The readings were followed by an open discussion on personal literary preferences, exploring what draws readers to particular poems and how individual experiences shape our responses to poetry.

The session experimented with collective authorship and spontaneous storytelling. One member began the story with a line, after which the piece was passed from one member to another, with each participant adding to and developing the narrative. Through this process of continuation, revision, and creative intervention, the members collaboratively produced an original short story.

The session was devoted to reading and discussing Kashmiri literature, with members engaging with “Jalli Hind Dand Fael” by Akhtar Mohiuddin and “Halas Chu Rotul” by Hari Krishna Kaul. The discussion provided an opportunity to explore Kashmiri literary expression, cultural contexts, language, memory, and the distinctive ways in which local experiences are articulated through literature.

The club revisited Shakespeare’s Hamlet through an interactive mock trial. Members examined the play’s major scenes, characters, conflicts, ambiguities, and contradictions, approaching the text from different perspectives and arguments. The activity transformed close reading into a lively exercise in interpretation, debate, and critical engagement.

The session featured the first episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog. The screening was followed by an engaging discussion that brought scientific, ethical, and religious questions into conversation, particularly around belief, rationality, morality, and the limits of human knowledge.

The club conducted a screening of Capernaum, followed by a discussion of the film and its narrative and thematic dimensions. The session encouraged members to engage with cinema as a form of storytelling and to reflect collectively on the questions and ideas raised by the film.

The session carried out a writing practice following the OULIPO techniques in which members under self-imposed formal and stylistic restrictions, like Lipogram and Lexical Lipogram produced poetry, short stories and brief essays.