I attended Bangalore Lit Fest 2018 over the weekend of 27th and 28th October, 2018. The event was held on the lawns of Hotel Lalit Ashok, on Kumarakrupa Road. It was an exhilarating, tiring, inspiring, fascinating and educative weekend. Now that the weekend it over, it is time for rest and reflection of the events of the past two days.
Lying in bed at home on the 29th, I went over the events of the weekend. I listened to a number of authors, each of whom stood out for the kind of inspiration they generated. Shoba Narayan (she is my cousin btw, and I am so proud of her), for example, weaved a simple act of giving a loan to a lady to buy a cow, into a beautiful story that linked the modern with the ancient, the city with the village, the rich with the poor and the literate with (not so) literates. She took a controversial topic of Cow and deftly and compassionately created an evocative story and presented it beautifully.
All of us have given loan to our maids or cleaning ladies, the laundry person or someone else in our lives. But only genius of Shoba could take up that mundane topic and create a book out of that.
Nuance and compassion were visible in the words of every author. Every book told, much more than the story itself, the tales of hard work, of burning the midnight oil, about having to ignore the constantly discouraging words of well meaning naysayers, about having to fight the emotions of fear and self doubt and the worst resistance of them all, the constant uncertainty whether their stories were something that potential readers will want to hear and read about.
VIPs that you regularly see on TV, casually mingled with the hoi polloi. Like I told Sreenivasan Jain, 'they all looked exactly like they did on TV'. There were others about whom I had read about like Naresh Fernandes of Scroll.in, David Frawley, Francois Gautier, Romulus Whitaker and his wife and author Janaki Lenin.
I purchased three books from the Litfest. 'The cows of Bangalore', by Shoba, 'Nautanki Dairies' by Dominic Franks and 'Closed Casket' by Sophie Hannah. Will read them and write detailed review of the books in my blog soon.
I have two suggestions and two complaints that I want to share.
Suggestion One, while the Litfest brought together writers and readers together, being an event where many like minded people visit, the Organizers could have played cupid and helped create many lasting friendships. It is a tremendous brand value when they say that 'their friendship blossomed in Bangalore Lit Fest 2018'.
Take my case for instance. When I went to the Litfest, I carried a number of 'Introduction Cards' that I wanted to liberally distribute. The cards were kind of 'Cheesy' with my photo embedded in it, but hey, something is better than nothing. My grand idea was to network extensively, to make new friends who shared my taste in books, to meet up with publishers and representatives of the publishing industry to find how an aspiring author should proceed when she want to get here writings published, to talk to authors on their pain and struggles and also learn about how they build characters in their books, how they balance dialogues with narration, how they handle characters and situations that were critical of people or institutions, especially in memoirs.
After all, I knew writing, didn't I? I have been blogging since 2005 and am one of the earliest bloggers in India who still blog.
There was only one hitch in my whole plan.
Me.
I did not share a single card, did not make a single friend. Everyone I saw were with someone, looked very important, too busy or too pretty.
So I also walked around looking important, checking my mobile phones and tweeting what I was participating in.
But I really wanted to talk about books. I was thirsting for intellectual engagement. You hardly get a chance to talk to people who excite you, who make your soul happy. The world is full of people focused on their own problems.
However it there was one place to find people who share your liberal social view, who share the same interest in English language, laugh at the same kind of jokes, express your thoughts better than you could do it yourself, it would have been the Litfest.
And I did not have the guts to talk to any stranger and initiate a conversation. What if they do not want to talk to me? What if they do not share my world view? What if they don't get my jokes? What if I become nervous and go red in my face make everyone embarrassed? I am known to do that. I am the Chandler Bing of the real world, and not even half as cute.
In a couple of times I tried to initiate conversation, I goofed up. And finally I shot my bolt. I decided it was safer to strut around looking important rather than risk an embarrassment of personal rejection.
I am sure there are others who were like me who wanted to make friends. When I look at the Tweets under the hashtag #Blrlitfest, I see a lot of people looking for friendship and camaraderie ('Hey I am at Litfest, if anyone is there, give me a shout' etc.). I saw these only at night. Had I known it earlier, I would definitely have met up with them over a coffee or something.
So suggestion to the organizers. Play cupid. In one of the Litfests I went to, they put up on a public place the tweets that were coming in. It was easy to find out if someone is looking for friendship or shared the same taste. In fact they even had hourly awards for the best tweets. That was a good idea that next year Litfest can try out.
Another suggestion, please share the videos of the sessions, there were a few that I missed which I would love to watch.
I also have two complaints.
One, I wanted to attend sessions by Sophie Hanna, the re-creator of Hercule Poirot, the famous Agatha Christie character. Unfortunately both her sessions were at the end of the day and clashed with the panel discussions. It would be a better idea to schedule the sessions by a single author at different times. I guess you would have tried (the suggestion is so obvious and I see that you have done it with other authors like Benyamin for example) and must have had some challenges with respect to this author.
Two, the voices on the Litfest were mostly liberal. That is just the nature of any Litfest. This creates an echo chamber though. There were books written by authors like Vivek Agnihotri, Bibek Debroy and others who would have added a different flavor to the discussions. Including a few books that expressed a counter view would have added nuance to the discussions. I am sure the Bangalore audience would have been courteous and discerning and would have added value to the discussions by their sensible and nuanced comments. Again, I trust that you must have tried and the authors decided not to come. After all voices like David Frawley, Chitra Subramaniam and Francois Gautier were there and were listened to with respect and dignity.
Some of the leading Bangaloreans like TV Mohandas Pai were notable by their absence. Perhaps it is a sign of the polarizing times that we live in, that Mr.Pai has boxed himself into a narrow opinions and would have been like a 'fish out of water' in the liberal world of Litfest. Perhaps his absence was for the best, who am I to know?
That is the moral. If we box ourselves into narrow or partial opinions, if we start thinking that our truth is the absolute truth and get into a 'Win Lose' mode, we tend to narrow our circle of influence. Indian concept of Maya says there is no single 'absolute truth', there are a billion 'absolute truths' out there. Our only job is to seek as many truths are possible. If we limit ourselves to our absolute truth, we lose our opportunity to learn and evolve.
Truth seeking is a process, which do not have an end result. The process itself is the end result.
Finally, I want to pitch a point by taking the daughters of my friend Abhinav Agarwal as an example. The sisters who Tweet under the handle @SistersWhoRead have recently self-published a book called 'A Year With the Mahapuranas'. Since they self published their book, they were probably out of the information loop that scouted around for participants in the Litfest. The sisters would have been the best example to teach and motivate the children to write and get their work published. And that is the objective of any Litfest, in my opinion.
So try to find space for some self-published authors also.
About the food. It was delicious and inexpensive, except for the beer. 300 bucks for a 330 ML bottle of Budweiser? Gimme a break. The staff at Lalit Ashok were pleasant, courteous and very efficient. Thank you hotel Lalit Ashok.
Surprisingly I did not see FM Radio covering the event. Wonder why?
Before I go into the last section of my post, a big shout out to the Organizers and the volunteers for doing an amazing work. You made two days of my life very memorable. Thank you very much for your hard work and courtesy.
I attended the following Sessions.
- The cows of Bangalore: Shoba Narayan with Rashmi Menon
- The things we do: Romulus Whitaker with Janaki Lenin
- Building blocks from life: On narrative non-fiction: Bachi Karkaria, Shoba Narayan, Manu S Pillai with V K Karthika
- Is India Illiberal? Chidanand Rajghatta with Naresh Fernandes
- Kama: the riddle of desire: Gurcharan Das with Shoba Narayan
- Populism, liberalism et al: Ashutosh Varshney with Narayan Ramachandran
- Winning on #377: Anjali Gopalan with Alok Prasanna Kumar.
- Kathagal: Readings in Malayalam: Benyamin with Sangeetha Sreenivasan
- Pencils drawn: Cartooning in trying times: Ponnappa and Ravishankar Etteth with Bachi Karkaria
- Is there an Indian road to equality?: Ramachandra Guha
- Editor's cut: Road to 2019: Mukund Padmanabhan, Narayan Ramachandran, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay and Saba Naqvi with Ashutosh Varshney.
Day 2 (Click to read the details of Day 2 Sessions that I attended)
- Mard ko dard hoga: #MeToo: Sandhya Menon, Sister Jesme, Tushita Patel and Vinta Nanda with Barkha Dutt
- ISRO: A personal history: R Aravamudan with Gita Aravamudan
- Chitchat on Bofors and Rafale: Chitra Subramaniam with Chidanand Rajghatta
- Nautanki Dairies: Dominic Franks
- Whose lie is it anyway: #FakeNews:Chitra Subramaniam, Francois Gautier, Naresh Fernandes, Mukund Padmanabhan, Pratik Sinha and Sreenivasan Jain with Nitin Pai.
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