My visit to India changed my perception

In this edition of HLF, Philippines was the ‘Guest Nation’. The award-winning Filipino writer, painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Pedro Jun Cruz Reyes, who visited India for the first time, shares his experience

Pedro Jun Cruz Reyes from the Philippines is a jack of all trades. He dons the role of a writer, painter, sculptor and filmmaker. Pedro says that his visit to India changed the perception of the country and left him impressed. “This is my first visit to India.

Before coming to this festival, whenever I read about India it was always about violence, women being raped or molested, corruption and floods but I changed my opinion after my visit to HLF. We (Filipinos) are called as ‘Indios’, which exactly sounds like Indians. I am very also happy that my country has been selected as ‘Guest Nation’ for this edition,” an elated Pedro said.

About the fest he said, “HLF is a great literary festival and it showed us what the Indian literature is. I was very much impressed with the talks delivered by eminent Indians like Arun Shourie and YV Reddy. We conducted various literature shows, workshops, seminars among others. We had panel discussions on ‘Writing as Heroism’, ‘Fiction for Publication and Production’ and ‘Literature Status in the Philippines’. We used this occasion to showcase our in literature in Hyderabad.”

Pedro Jun Cruz Reyes is fondly called ‘Amang’ (father) by many writers and artists because of his untiring support to budding artists. “I love writing, painting, sculpting and acting. Philippines is a poor country and we are developing now. The books written by the Indian writers are very popular in our nation. But most of my country people don’t have money to buy books.

I read Tamil literature when it was translated into English and it was excellent. Translation does wonders and it overcomes the language barriers. We are trying to develop our nation’s identity in all fields,” he adds.

Pedro shares that in 2004 all of his art works were destroyed in a fire accident. “All my works were burnt to ash in the blaze. I got insurance money for my works but it feels bad to see your works turning into ashes. But one should not lose hope and I don’t worry about that much as I can write and paint anytime.”

Pedro feels that today technology is making everything easy even art. “With globalisation, we all can share our works with others,” he says and adds “I guess in future we can expect cyber wars between countries. One nation may destroy the data of the other country.”

By V Sateesh Reddy