Much of that sentiment was echoed at 4 pm in JLF’s central lawn yesterday when festival organisers had to announce that a video link by Rushdie would not go through as planned, because the increasing protests by orthodox Muslims across India had escalated to the point that there were Muslims in the audience who were threatening violence if the video conference was aired. There were rumours also that a large crowd of Muslim protestors were heading towards the venue to create problems. The organisers called it an ‘idiotic siuation’, and that they were ‘pushed against the wall’, but made a call to put the safety of attendees first. The responses have been covered over numerous TV channels, including the blistering impromptu panel discussion by Tehelka editors and public figures that included Salim Engineer, secretary of Jamaat-e-Islami explain his side of the protest. For the first time in my life, I started to look around me and actually spot the Muslim faces in the audience, and wonder if a riot would break out any moment. This was bad, we realised, not only, because of free speech, but because we were looking at Muslims as potential rabble-rousers, not as spectators. Couldn’t it have been possible that several Muslims were here to view the conference, to hear what Rushdie had to say?

But yes, these are dark times for India, and we have been in the dark times for a long while now, despite what most people will be willing to admit. There have been several situations all over the country where artists, writers, activists are often subdued by force and debates are silenced in the name of extremely orthodox religion. But to play a little Devil’s advocate here, I’d like to point out that things are not perhaps as bad as they seem – if free speech were such an issue, would Salim Engineer be allowed to have his say on the same stage and media space as a Tarun Tejpal or Javed Akhtar? Would several writers banned in their own states be able to speak on the same platform as Ondaatje and Dawkins? Would this whole Rushdie video link debacle be followed by an Intelligence Squared debate on man vs. God? India exists in plurality, and perhaps we need to see this situation as both bad and good, both unfree, yet free.

So it’s ironic in retrospect that this last day was a day that had a full share of the godly and ungodly sessions. A session on Rumi for instance, had a debate about whether Rumi occupied an Islamic philosophical position in the literary world especially in the West, and the answer was that he usually sat in the self-help feel good section in bookshops. Sunil Kumar astutely pointed out that perhaps Rumi had a different value for different persons depending on your own state of spritual awareness.

And then Javed Akhtar came forth to speak on some of the poems in his new collection ‘Lava’. Akhtar also extrapolated about the ghazal and its traditions, and how it was perhaps under-utilised as a poetic form in the West. The more interesting aspect of this session came from audience questions. A query on how to improve as poet involved some discussion on the difference between art and craft, and how Akhtar thinks ‘All art is the practice of a schizophrenic’, in the sense, that even as an artist is immersed in the imaginative muse, s/he has to be calculatively aware of what kind of craft is being used. The one thing that bothered me was a discussion on critics, and Akhtar jokingly said that critics don’t like anyone who is popular and alive. They have no problem with popular and dead, or unpopular and alive, but it’s popularity in a living, free world that bothers them. This is not the first time I’ve come across artists who dismiss what critics say. Most Indian art forms in the last few decades have been extremely disdainful of the critic’s role in the artistic community. This is a very big problem, because art is rarely standalone pieces of work so much as a cultural discourse of its time. and cultural discourse is impossible without the critic, an external analyser, if you will, who is able to put the art and its cultural value in a certain context. Akhtar went on to say that critics also like to be THE authority on what’s good and what’s not, and perhaps that’s why they dissect art and artists; it’s a validating platform to them. I was not impressed that Javedsaab for all his intellect and liberal attitude was not so different from other egotists who like to think they and their work are above critiquing,and who don’t see the valueof criticsin the Indian literary movement. It’s also helpful in noting why the crticial review is aiece sorely missing in the Indian publishing scenario; there are very few widely read film or literary journals in India that respectfully place a critic in the contextual discussion.

The next session was the always impressive Richard Dawkins who spoke extensively on his concept of the meme – a cultural unit of society that he likens to a cultural gene. His book The Selfish Gene talks about this in much more detail, but basically, anything like a song, a poem a fashion trend, etc. are all memes as they copy information socially so it can be retained. My favourite part of this section was when Dawkins expounded on a genetic explanation for altruism, something that theists often believe is God-given. Dawkins is funny, unexpectedly modest and a through and through rational, something people in the audience around me kept commenting on, like he was a freak. Dawkins also said that he believes vegetarianism is the humanist rational choice for anyone who wants to be ethical in this world, especially referring to his work on the Great Apes project with Peter Singer. I can keep writing on the Dawkins session – I have four pages of notes from his talk, and being a science buff, it leaves plenty of food for thought, but I will refrain because it does not have too much literary significance.

I briefly attended the Tom Stoppard session, mainly because the Mark Tully session got cancelled. Tom is good, if a bit altruistically misguided when asking the audience for questions instead of randomly talking, and one silly festival attendee asked him to comment on the influence of quantum physics on literature. Like, seriously? Anyway, Tom is a seriously smart playwright and for anyone in the audience who is a theatre-buff, I think his session was hugely useful but for me, it’s not really my area of interest, so I refrained.

Finally, came the Intelligence Squared debate, which I had much hopes for, but which anti-climactically bad. Firstly, the question framed was just stupid – This House Believes That Man Has Replaced God. To what context, I am not sure they wanted to mention, but the question already pre-supposes the existence of God, in which case having a debate or polarised argument is pretty moot, no? A better way to phrase it would have been ‘Man has replaced the concept of God’. But then they compounded it by having guests such as Swami Agnivesh and Salim Engineer who are not apologists of any order. You may as well have invited Zakir Naik, the so-called apologist for Islam as a guest and it would at least have been entertaining. Or Sri Sri Sri Ravishankar who possesses some reasoning capacity. Instead there were 5 atheists facing off 3 irrational ambiguous rhetoric-spewing theists, in a totally pointless argument. Considering Dawkins has had magnificent debates with the likes of Alistair McGrath and A.E. Wilder Smith, and has often said he doesn’t want to debate with creationists in a public forum as it may seem to the public that both stances are viable, whereas creationism is just unscientific and unsupportable, I wonder why he agreed to this so-called debate. I am now afraid Dawkins may think India and its idiotic illogic may not be worth a revisit, and I hope if he is here for any other talks, he finds a more intelligent, nuanced audience. i should mention Akhtar and Aruna Roy was surprisingly good in this debate too.

So, that concludes my roundup of this highly dramatic, eventful Jaipur Literature Festival. I intend to write one more post, perhaps comparing this experience to my experience with Melbourne Writers Festival, and maybe speak a little bit on the programming and infrastructure of JLF as far as liteary festivals go. There are some interesting points of difference and worth noting, and they deserve some commentary so I hope soon, that I can post again.

Anyway, Day 4 has been an up and down sorta day.

To start off, we had the Bollywood-focus session with Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Gulzar and Vishal Bharadwaj titled Kahaani Kise Kehte Hain: Script, Story, Screenplay. It seems like crowds from Delhi had arrived only for this one session. A catfight erupted in the row in front of us regarding seats, and had to be settled by security staff. And then the MC Catriona introduced the session totally butchering the Hindi title to much laughter from the audience. I have a theory about the use of British Council people introducing sessions that I will elaborate on a bit later.

Anyway, I am typing this while waiting for the Richard Dawkins session to begin, and I’m glad to report the crowds have finally reduced and there have been smaller queues, less jostling and a more good-humoured crowd, which makes for a pleasanter experience.

There has also been some buzz generated on Twitter through this latest piece by S. Anand who I covered yesterday in a JLF session, and who has now resorted to LitFest-bashing in the news: http://www.firstpost.com/living/the-tragedy-and-farce-of-jlf-the-greatest-literary-show-190696.html

Whether you think it’s warranted or not, is of course, up to you.

So to begin with, the Kahaani session was moderated by Samit Basu who began by saying the moderator of the previous day’s session made him want to go put a plastic bucket on her head to shut her up. People cheered, and so did I. The panel then discussed the difference between script and screenplay, Javed Akhtar called the script the ‘what’ and the screenplay the ‘how’. Prasoon Joshi then spoke on how cinema is experential, a collective consumption whereas a book is individually absorbed. Vishal Bharadwaj spoke about his films and how his trick in pinpointing the story and screenplay was in explaining the premise of the film in a single line, and then splitting it into 3 parts which will form the 3-act structure. For instance, Omkara’s premise, based on Othello. was ‘Jealousy | destroys both itself | and the object of jealousy’, and the 3 parts it splits into are also highlighted.

Javed Akhtar interjected here, and talked a bit about the differences between the Indian narrative style and the Western narrative style. Akhtar performed a wonderful impromptu scene from an old school theatrical film, with flowery, overtly dramatic dialogue to highlight Hindi cinema’s Urdu-Parsi theatre heritage. He had a very valid point to make that India had inherited its form of narrative, and had not invented it. This was a critical point of debate in newly independent India where critics often pointed to Kurosawa and Kieslowski and the lack in Indian cinema’s artistic intentions. But Akhtar explained how cinema in Japan and Europe have been practically made extinct of late through the onslaught of Hollywood, while Indian cinema still occupies a unique cultural space in the Indian audience.

He gave an example of how European cinema could show a boy and a girl who meet at a train station, stand on opposite corners of the platform, wait for the train and with no dialogue and minimal music, board different trains and head off on their own journeys, but an Indian audience will not be satisfied with such cinema. At this, Gulzar added that the Indian version of this would involve a significant backstory about why the girl had run away from home, a musical interlude of their falling in love while waiting for the train, and for added drama, maybe a crisis where the girl realises that the boy is not rich or employed, and faced with the very real complications of having to live with him decide not to be with him and so at the end of the film, they decide to board different trains and with a tragic song, the credits would roll. Loud applause immediately followed this improvised scripting. They also did a similar reworking of the hare and tortoise story, but to repeat it prosaically here would be downplaying the marvellous spontaneity and humour of the whole process, so I’ll just say, you HAD to have been there.

I’m not entirely sure why I picked this session; there wasn’t any other interesting session at the same time, and I wanted to stay for The Short Story one that was to follow. Plus, I do like Gulzar and Akhtar’s humour, and Vishal’s earthy logic, so this was a hugely interesting session. Let me also say, Javed Akhtar is a skilled raconteur, and watching him match wits with Gulzar and the others was a treat. The session ended when Gulzar surprised Akhtar by revealing a copy of his latest book – yet to hit the shelves – and had him read from the new collection there.

The next session was The Short Story. I was really looking forward to Annie Proulx in this session for her beautifully sparse, minimalistic style that complements the short story form so well, but we were informed bad weather had madePet travelling impossible for her, so we had the remaining authors moderated by Michael Ondaatje, who was filling in for Hari Kunzru. This session was strictly so-so, because I think Ondaatje was unprepared and was hoping the writers would guide the discussion themselves, but as they were too disparate a lot, that didn’t quite happen. Linda Spalding made some cliched crack about how the short story was like a one-night stand, and the talk got minorly interesting when they discussed notions of time within the short story. The only other memorable moment was when an audience member asked the authors why there wasn’t more of a platform for short stories apart from The New Yorker. I thought it was an incredibly juvenile question to ask, and if anyone calls themselves a good reader they should be aware of several magazines and reviews out there that do publish short stories, particularly by new, lesser known writers, and many of them have a highly active net presence. JLF’s own Little Magazines session could have been a start, surely. It seems to me Indian writers don’t read anything beyond the big names and publications in the limelight, and unsmart readers are just plain silly. But you have to hand it to the brilliantly droll Jamaica Kincaid who in the tone of your favourite aunt giving advice said, “I don’t believe it’s right to make us responsible for your publishing woes. This is not a workshop for aspiring writers,” which of course wentdown great with the audience.

The next session I sat in for was the Adaptations one, moderated by the excellent Girish Karnad who handled the guests like a pro. I wasn’t extremely keen on this session as much of it had to do with adapting from book or stage to film, and issues with fidelity to the source material, and directorial intentions, etc. I did find out Lionel Shriver was a woman only at this session, which was kind of embarrassing, and Karnad also handled some really imbecilic audience questions with some tact.

It seems from all of the various sessions over the last few days, the average JLF attendee is not very well-read, extremely ambitious and so self-important. Someone on Twitter snarkily remarked that JLF was a great idea until South Delhi got a hold of it, and there have been more than a few mutterings abut how the elite Delhi crowd has taken over the audience. It’s embarrassing to think international guests of the calibre of Steven Pinker, A. C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Arvind Mehrotra have to deal with immature juvenile questions, but it’s infintely bad as well that Indian guests of the calibre of Vishal Bharadwaj has to be accused of disrespecting Shakespeare from an audience member claiming to be ‘from literature’. Hell, I’ll just go on saying that, shall I? “Excuse me, Mr. Dalrymple, I am from literature, and I think Rushdie is from literature, and we should all just love each other and not ban books, kthxbai.”

Anyway, I don’t know if we should blame this as a South Delhi or South Bombay or South Indian phenomenon or whatever. I think the generations of substandard arts education in our schools and colleges are seeing fruit in arts events of this kind. We are not really a culture that understands critical thought and debate, especially when it hasn’t been taught to us as a valuable method of understanding the world. So when an audience member confronts Richard Dawkins by arrogantly stating, “You need to know about atheist traditions in India”, only someone with profound humility can say to the crowd listening in, “Yes, there is a lot I have to learn about India.” When you consider the man is a much felicitated academic and scientist from Oxford, it underscores the huge difference in this South whatever attitude and a scholarly modesty.

Okay, I’ll get off my high horse for a bit.

In the afternoon, I attended the Writing and Insularity session, which was about writing on or about islands, but as most of the authors on this panel from the island nations had migrated to the UK or US, I didn’t think the debate was as meaningful as it could have been. Again, the only person who stood out from that session was Jamaica Kincaid, who on being asked if her racial identity was ever an issue as an author from the West Indies, said very poker-faced, “I think everyone is black until someone tells me that I am in fact, black or that someone else isn’t”. How can you not love her?

I did attend the Stalin session by Stalin biographer Simon Montefiore, mainly because I think my knowledge of 20th century Russian history is a bit lacking, but this probably wasn’t the most useful session that way. It dealt a lot with the personal Stalin, his relationship with his wife and family, how his politics unfolded with the politics of the USSR at the time, and was interesting from an anecdotal point of view.

I tried to hang around the Afropolitan discussion just as the Dawkins event began, and briefly heard the start of Okri and Teju Cole speak about being African, and I have to say Teju Cole is just… awesome. He’s witty and articulate and hot. Yes, yes, I have a wee bit of a crush, but how can you not when the guy says he’s a pessimist but an ‘open-minded’ one? Anyway, I’d dearly have loved to stay, but I wasn’t going to miss out on Dawkins, so I had to sacrifice.

Finally, I started this post while waiting for Dawkins to take the stage for a reading from his latest work. I don’t think Dawkins has the best approach of the Four Horsemen; my favourite is the softer, more humane Sam Harris or even Hitchens’ acerbic wit, but Dawkins is clearly the best writer of them, with a rich appreciation for poetry and art. So his reading from Unweaving the Rainbow was articulate, lyrical and yes, confronting for any believer. What astonished me – and I don’t use the term lightly – was the quality of audience questions. There was only one real idiotic question that I covered above, and the rest were intelligent, respectful and appreciative of Dawkins’ fearful intellect. Javed Akhtar surprised the audience but speaking up and saying he believed Dawkins was one of the 3 greatest intellectuals in the world, which an abashed Dawkins waved off, and proceeded to also ask an intelligent question. Dawkins will be at the Intelligence Squared debate tomorrow,which I am hugely looking forward to. I have attended an I2 debate in Mebourne before and it’s a traditional British form of back and forth argument that makes for delightful watching, and Akhtar and Dawkins are on the same panel and I’m quite looking forward to it.

Also, fingers crossed for Salman Rushdie. I think it’s time everyone else shuts up and lets him talk, no? So, I wholeheartedly recommend you sign the petition here:

http://www.change.org/petitions/prime-minister-india-reconsider-the-ban-on-salman-rushdies-the-satanic-verses#

First, let me link to a couple of statements surrounding the Satanic Verses issue, if you haven’t already read about the whole thing through Twitter.

Hari Kunzru’s statement on the events: http://www.harikunzru.com/archive/reading-satanic-verses-jaipur-2012

William Dalrymple’s statement on how things unfolded: http://www.firstpost.com/india/i-had-no-idea-reading-from-the-satanic-verses-is-a-crime-dalrymple-189924.html

I’ve already said much of how I felt in yesterday’s post, but this quote by Dalrymple is quite telling, “We can support free speech right up to the point that they break the law.” Really, should anyone have to point out the fallacy of that statement? Either free speech IS the law, or it isn’t.

Anyway, there have been several WTF moments throughout the day, starting with the very first, when Namita Gokhale introduced the Kabir and Dadu Dayal session by saying Kabir was, ‘Another Oprah Winfrey of another time, but who just wasn’t on TV’.

*crickets sound in the silence*

Yes well, Namita was saved only by the awesomeness of this session that included the likes of the awesome Shabnam Virmani, the awesome Purushottam Agrawal and the awesome Arvind K. Mehrotra – absolutely no sarcasm here. Shabnam started the session with a Kabir gem in her typical tambura-enhanced voice, and went on to quote the Kabir couplet that translates roughly to, “Reading a way, you become a stone, writing a way you become brick, and then you become unable to be melted by even a little bit of love”. Shabnam asserted that her knowledge of Kabir is through song, that the knowledge of the mind is divisive, it involves fragmenting and labelling, but the knowledge of the body intuits deeper connections. In particular with Kabir’s poetry, her experience with Kabir panthis has evolved her spirituality through song and experience, rather than just words and poetry.

There was one thing Shabnam said that struck something in me, that songs tend to fly across borders and godmen and corporations and governments, while words remain frozen on a page, ad that’s why the medium of song matters to her. I didn’t quite agree, don’t books fly too? Can’t they be passed on translated, collected and recited? I just have to take the side of literature on this.

Monika Boehm-Tettlebach was next, an academic on Dadu Dayal, who was a Gujarati-Rajasthani devotional saint who lived on similar non-orthodox spiritual lines as Kabir. Monika spoke briefly on the importance of lay people keeping alive oral Bhakti traditions, and how folk singers competke with a shallower music of the media.

She was followed by the highly impressive Agrawal, who emphasised two aspects of Kabir- that while Kabir is unique, but he is not alone in the tradition of Bhakti poets, he isn’t an accident of history but part of an ongoing culture of bhakti. The second point he made was that Kabir’s idea of love is disturbing, as it involved not just ruthless self-interrogation but interrogation of everyone around you. Kabir’s poetry is often seen in today’s Hindu-Muslim context, but when you consider it was written 500 years ago in a highly orthodox religious, casteist setup, Kabir’s notion of love was not anti-intellectual, anti-rational, but quite the opposite. He challenged traditional classical Sanskrit mantras with colloquial talk of faith. Agrawal is very much an expert on the rational, intellectual, argumentative Kabir, and stresses that he was drawn to Kabir as a poet much before any spiritual fascination took ahold of him.

This is polar to Arvind Mehrotra’s interest in Kabir, who he says is a poet of hatred, a poet of death. Mehrotra is a staunch atheist, but he drawn to the fact that had Kabir existed today, he would probably be arrested for disturbing the peace. Another interesting aspect of Kabir Mehrotra mentioned was the fact that there is no historical Kabir, he exists entirely in the oral imaginations of bhakti poets, practitioners and singers. It’s fascinating to think that Kabir could well be a literary hoax, a created romantic figure, were it not for the efforts of a community to sustain facets of his spirituality.

Anyway, if you are not a Kabir-fan (I hesitate to use the word bhakt — I am not a believer in any tradition, but a student of Kabir’s poetics), you are probably bored by this so far. But no fear, the drama in the next few sessions would have been enough to last you a long time. Because most of the Kabir session was interrupted by security and preparatons for Oprah’s grand entry at JLF.

What can I possibly say about Oprah that hasn’t already been said on Twitter?

OMG youguyz, Sabya’s totally designed her like the perfect outfit!

The 3 things she’ll take back about India, “The traffic – what ARE you guys doing out there? Red lights, are they there for your entertainment?”

*guffaws*

“And the fact that you all have altars in your house, I mean even the slum people have altars, Aishwarya has altars, it’s like you all LIVE your religion!”

Hmmm, altars? Whatever, Oprah said ‘Aishwarya’. *more applause*

“And the living with the family, I sototally didn’t get that, but after having dinner with three generations of a family, I sototallydo. It’s all about the family, y’all!”

*wild whistling and clapping*

“We love you Oprah!”

Anyway, if you’re wondering how I sat through such riveting conversation, I didn’t, I got up to just about make it to the Literature of Protest session, which I am very glad to say was sototallymoreawesome than Oprah’s biggest giveaway.

I walked in just in time as the session moderator, publisher, S. Anand read a symbolic passage from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which I want to quote:

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

The session proceeded with Sri Lankan Tamil poet in exile, Cheran, who did a reading of his poetry. S. Anand followed with some direct, attacking questions to the other guests starting with Malayalam writer, K. Satchidanandan, asking him his opinion on the level of corporate corruption versus the state, which is the form of protest most people take up, in particular highlighting some of the venue names at JLF, for instance, the TATA Steel front lawns, the IDFC Durbar Hall, etc. In his own words, Anand suggested that we were getting into a lifestyle where we were being co-opted into corporate funding and sponsorship. Satchidanandan admitted it is a problem but when direct confrontation is not effective, We had to find modes within the system. He asked, ” Can we keep our words clean and the protest burning?”

S. Anand then went on to ask “What do we do with banned books?”, in the sense, once a book is banned,what next? To this, Satchidanandan replied, “When a book is banned, you have already failed as a society.” That was probably my favourite comment of the day. He also suggested that sone writers were of the opinion that certain subjects were untreatable, like people say poetry is impossible after Auschwitz, but it’s not. The question should be what kind of poetry is now possible, because we need to adapt, to evolve, rather than to treat subjects only in acceptable ways.

Then, it came to my favourite find of this year’s JLF, Charu Nivedita. Charu spoke of having to self-publish because his protest didn’t really have a space in Tamil Nadu’s literature. He said, “I exiled myself”, because apparently no one reads anymore in Tamil Nadu. Charu also called Karunanidhi the ‘Kapil Sibal of Tamil Nadu’ – to much applause – and had much to say about Tamil pop culture. He then read a wonderful section from his short story “Message Bearers from Stars and Necrophiles”. I am starting to despair most of his work may remain untranslated, and I may have to learn to read Tamil if I am ever to read all of it. Also, Charu was interrupted by Anand in his reading, which seems to be a habit of the JLF moderators – is it so hard to talk to a writer before the session starts telling him/her how the talk will be structured, how long you’d like them to speak and when he should do his reading? It seems much of the moderating is spontaneous, but more significantly, just downright rude. To compound it by saying, “Or we’ll run out of time” is even more insulting – next time, maybe these sessions should actually be planned by the moderators in advance?

The final speaker was Gogu Shyamala, a Dalit Telugu writer who wryly said her identity at JLF was the Telangana Telugu writer. She spoke of how her writing didn’t feel like a protest; she wrote for her aesthetics, and others call her writing a protest. Some of the conversation was in Telugu, so I couldn’t follow it. But what was again appalling was the patronising way Anand stepped in to correct Shyamala’s English pronunciation. I don’t think any of us in the audience minded her slower reading and painstaking effort in pronouncing the words right, but Anand interrupting to correct her like she was five years old was just not right.

The real drama hit the roof when the floor was open for discussion, and an audience member asked Cheran about the Indian government’s role in the Tamil genocide. Cheran said he spoke with the risk of never getting an Indian visa again, but yes, he believed the government of India was complicit in the Tamil genocide.

Another audience member stood up to ask Anand about the reading of the Verses, and Anand said quite openly that he found it problematic that not only were writers who defied the ban by reading asked to leave the festival by its organisers, but that they were also made to sign statements absolving the festival of all responsibility. When an organiser in the audience tried to say something, Namita Gokhale stormed in and chose to respond to Anand, saying that it would be a disservice to the 260 other writers and the the 50,000 participants to focus on just one writer and his book. She also said that while we should discuss Rushdie and read Rushdie, and it’s perhaps for the worse that his book was banned, but that writers should read and discuss it at their own time.

It seemed in between that Namita tried to deny that organisers had asked their authors to leave, but when Nilanjana stood up to point out that she had been personally present when Thayil was asked, Namita diplomatically stated that they were concerned for the well-being of the four authors in question. One of CNN IBN’s journalists – I think it’s Anubha Bhonsle – stood up to point out that the authors on stage were also banned in their own states and hometowns, and that maybe too much focus was on Rushdie, which many agreed with. Clearly, the audience was abuzz when Anand closed the session with Satchidanandan’s reading of a poem for Irom Sharmila.

I only stayed for one more session, Writer as Exile which had an interesting mix of speakers from Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon and Burma and nearly all of them were living in exile in the UK or US. The crowds had clearly come for Fatima Bhutto, and were impatient when Kamin Mohammadi and Hanan al-Shaykh spoke of their experience of being in exile. William Dalrymple who moderated the session seemed a little too pally when conversing with Fatima Bhutto, but that may have just been my snarky side making up for my frustration with the insane number of people in Diggi today. I didn’t quite enjoy this session as much as I thought I would have, because I was hoping it would explore the idea that the writer’s act of writing is itself an exile, and their circumstances could mirror that experience well. But much of the talk was around romanticised ideas of the homeland, which I don’t necessarily subscribe to, especially considering most of these people didn’t seem like they’d be willing to give up their cushy First World lifestyles in exchange for living in their homeland again. There didn’t really seem that much of a sense of nostalgia in their words either, but I’m willing to admit I didn’t quite get it. I also wondered at this crush to see Fatima Bhutto. Would there be such interest in her if she wasn’t young and pretty?

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow JLF will get a post-Oprah lull and I can finally find some seats in the sessions. Also, Nilanjana Roy will put up her petition to Unban the Verses online tomorrow and I’m hoping to link that in.

I also think I’ve figured out how to select the best sessions in JLF – avoid the big names and the celebrities, and I find that those have often been the best sessions, whether it was discovering Oloixarac and Nivedita, or watching Virmani and Mehrotra and Agrawal talk about their passion for Kabir, or Grayling and Pinkers uber-intellectual discussion on the context of the Enlightenment, or even the little magazines session where I think I found some new reading material. The big names have so far been a disappointment. I’m hoping Annie Proulx won’t be, so fingers crossed.

The morning session on Day 2 was on Creativity, Censorship & Dissent. Ironic I know, considering the series of events yesterday regarding Rushdie. The speakers on this panel were a numerous bunch, moderated by Tehelka’s Shoma Chaudhury. I’ve been dissatisfied with the quality of moderators JLF has been selecting – they all seem unprepared, nervous, unable to relate to the speakers and generally unimpressive. Shoma Chaudhury in particular made a grave faux pas in introducing one of the speakers in this session, saying poet Cheran was from Tamil Nadu, when in fact, he’s a Sri Lankan Tamil exiled and living in Canada. I was even more appalled when Cheran gently corrected her and she didn’t even apologise or acknowledge the enormity of her error. Are these moderators selected on the spot and not given any background material? Are they not supposed to have read at least some of the speakers they are dealing with? And then there is the tendency to go into lengthy introduction regarding the topic – Shoma went on to talk about the ‘profound purpose of art’ and how it cannot exist as a ‘supermarket of liberal sensibilities’ and when she kept going for ten whole minutes, I started getting frustrated. There are 5 specific writers on stage meant to be talking about their experiences with censorship, and instead we are listening to Tehelka’s editor talk on dissent. This was all the more problematic when at the end we ran out of time and could not hear the speakers respond to anything more than 2 questions. In addition, when a cheeky audience member mentioned that censorship talk was rubbish when a bad poet like Sibal was a guest, Shoma tried to defend Sibal as a choice of speaker. Now Sibal has been an idiot, we know, but defenders of Sibal’s idiotic poetry deserve to be called bigger idiots, no? But then, I doubt Shoma has actually read his work either, she seems consistently clueless. Okay, okay, I’ll stop my rant and come back to the speakers.

Siddharth Gigoo, a Kashmiri writer spoke briefly and diplomatically about the Kashmiri Literary Festival fiasco, and said nothing really new. The three speakers who stood out for me were Cheran, Tamil author and activist Charu Nivedita and Hindi/Bollywood lyricist Prasoon Joshi. Cheran spoke first on 2 aspects of freedom of expression – that the freedom should be absolute with no restrictions, and that it comes with responsibility, but one which is not constitutionalised or legalised. It’s when either is not fulfilled that grave issues affect our right to expression. Cheran also highlighted the different ways in which writers can deal with censorship – either maintaining a strategic silence, or write and be burned or write about one thing when you actually mean to say something else. His example of writing about war by writing instead about chana dal was hilarious. Prasoon Joshi was unexpectedly impressive. He noted how China used the Grass Mud Horse or Cao Ní Ma internet meme to escape internet filters for obscene content, and how a new language lexicon, a parallel subversive language can be created when pushed up against a wall. This ties in with the kind of literature I’ve been very interested in for the past few years, censored Soviet Russian dystopias and futuristic stuff, Borgesian world-building, Cortazar’s meta-narratives, all of these tie in with a kind of dissent against the establishment.

Charu Nivedita came in exactly at this point to talk about the tragicomic situation in Tamil Nadu that borders on the ridiculous, how a naked Jain monk was hounded by fanatics of both believers and rationalists, how dress codes are imposed on girls in universities by claiming the men will be corrupted. He also mentioned Lacan who once wrote “Women don’t exist”, and that he thinks in a parallel way, “Writers don’t exist in Tamil Nadu”. One troubling aspect that Charu brought up was the failure of the literary artistic community in India in supporting writers, and in fact, it is often that community itself that censors, much more than state restrictions. Charu’s fiction has been described as transgressive and postmodern – words that are not used often for contemporary Indian writers in English much, and it sounds very very interesting. Now that I’ve bought his Zero Degree, I hope to review it very soon. Oh, the last writer was Tahmina Anam, who spoke a little on the Taslima issue, but nothing significantly memorable.

The next session carried on the theme of dissent with Transformations and Transgressions: Two Voices, with Charu Nivedita again, and Dalit Tamil writer Bama Faustina. The session was moderated by Namita Gikhale, and again, awkwardly managed. First, her questions to Bama were vague and overarching – what kind of response do you expect when you ask an author to talk about her life, and all the experiences that led her to write her novel? Then 15 minutes in, Namita realises this could go on for a while, and interrupts the speaker to tell her to wrap it up in 5 minutes so the other speaker can have his turn. And then she rhapsodised about Tamil as a language, incredibly she turns to the audience saying, “You know, there is no other country in the world that has the multilinguistic diversity that India does, we have 29 official languages and hundreds of dialects and thousands and thousands of mother tongues. And I’d love to hear the real flavour of Tamil, the language that these writers write in”. I quickly survey the room and 99% of us are sure enough Indian, and I’m not sure who Gokhale is patronising here.

To come back to the writers, Bama was wonderfully simple and honest with her story and picking a small scene in her novel Karukku highlighting the caste focus, did a dramatic entertaining reading. Charu continued to impress with a highly evocative section from his short story Karnadaga Murasu, dripping with sexual imagery and lyrical intensity. If I were to compare Charu’s style to anybody else, I’d say he was an Indian George Bataille, but slightly more poetic. The writers read segments in Tamil as well , Bama read the same excerpt, and Charu read from Zero Degree.  If it wasn’t for a forcedly cheerful Gokhale, this could have been a great session.

The afternoon sessions saw a very ordinary Ben Okri, who disappointed, despite a humorous Chandrahas Choudhury trying to keep the discussion from getting too airy-fairy, but Okri was on a roll. He read poems like “They tell me that the world is rich with terror, I tell you that the world is rich with love unfound.” His effort at humanism could have given Deepak Chopra a run for his money. Okay, maybe I’m being harsh, but that kind of talk is really not my thing, especially when he talks of words becoming consciousness and reality…? I don’t know, I probably just wasn’t getting all of this. Just when he started on, “To see something, one must first be something” and ended with “It takes a work of art to see a work of art”, everyone started applauding, and I decided I needed a chai to wake myself up.

Most of the other sessions were not my cup of tea (haha) so I tried wandering around the enormous hordes of people at Diggi to catch bits and pieces of random talks, and came across the A.C. Grayling & Steven Pinker intellectual session on the Enlightenment period. Frankly, both are intensely cerebral and entirely wasted on an audience that only made space for idiotic questions like “I’m surprised you didn’t mention the Indian enlightenment period, Mr. Grayling”, and “Why are there no inter-disciplinary studies in universities anymore, Sir?” Grayling’s classic “Um, but there are, where I teach” (Oxford) was unintentionally hilarious. I’m going to try and reserve judgment on the audience quality for the remaining days, but I have to tell you the odds are slim that there are any smart people around in JLF. Also, moderator Vijay Tankha for this session was a total saving grace who handled his conversation with the luminaries with ease and humour.

I have been ruminating on the role JLF should have and could have played in the Rushdie fiasco and I am coming to the conclusion that Charu’s point about the artistic community letting us down has held true. The organisers of the festival want debate and discussion within the purvey of Indian law. But when censorship itself becomes law, what kind of debate are you expecting? The whole affair reeks of a sordid, tepid response. Kumar and Kunzru who so intrepidly read out of Rushdie’s novel yesterday are reported to have fled the country overnight, like this was a bad espionage film. Now the festival wants to look squeaky clean yet moral. As someone responded on Twitter, one can almost hear Pontius Pilate calling for the water at JLF. At the height of Stalin’s purges, Soviet writers willingly went to labour camps and faced firing squads, Lorca was executed despite being apolitical in the Spanish Civil War, and today’s writers want to rock the censorship boat but flee when the consequences get a little hot.

Anyway, tomorrow is D-day, rather O-day, when the Queen of daytime soap makes her daytime JLF appearance.I am dreading the crowds – the start of the weekend has been bad enough, but tomorrow, I’m honestly predicting a stampede to see Oprah Winfrey, who will no doubt wear a saree. I hope I live to tell the tale.

First, Salman Rushdie is officially not attending because of security concerns, so that’s one question answered. It’s disappointing because I’ve missed Salman Rushdie on another occasion at Melbourne Writers’ Festival too. It is however not surprising, considering India’s current political climate. It’s enervating though that several writers took to reading The Satanic Verses on stage at a session. Bravo, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi.

Now, I really wish I had made it for last year’s festival because some of the guests on this programming list are of questionable credentials as far as writing goes, and I wish I had a better frame of reference for JLF. Instead, I’m reviewing it in the year they invite Oprah Winfrey and Kapil Sibal – the Union Minister for Telecom and something-something in the current Indian government. Aren’t they published, you ask? Yes, but so is Paris Hilton, for what it’s worth.

So I began Day 1 with middling expectations. The morning’s keynote was on the tradition of Bhakti poetry, which Namita Gokhale, festival co-director announced was the overarching theme for this year. The speakers were Purushottam Agrawal, critic, academic and Hindi poet and and Arvind K Mehrotra, both of whom spoke on the different Bhakti saints. Both quoted Kabir – who I adore. Both of them also quoted Kabir in the specific context of the Rushdie incident and the question of free speech. Agrawal spoke almost entirely in Hindi, and I was quite relieved I could follow most it. Arvind Mehrotra mainly read from a selection of Bhakti poets such as Appar, Nammalvar, Janabai, Tukaram and Kabir. I also wound up sitting close to Shabnam Virmani of the Kabir Project, who assured me she’d be performing in the coming days.

The next session was a Michael Ondaatje talking to Amitava Kumar. I’m not the biggest Ondaatje fan, so this was just about alright. One interesting thing was that Ondaatje uses a montage, pluralistic style of storytelling, something he said he felt affirmed through Japanese cinema which has a similar list-like style. I’ve heard other writers mention they prefer this to the modern first-person narrative, which they find limiting.

The ‘Little Magazines’ session was a cheery interlude with the editors of four small press and independent publishers in India, except they seem to prefer the term ‘little magazines’. What was great was the amount of passion they clearly shared for discovering new, emerging writers. K Satchidanandan went as far as to call these publications avant-garde for daring to attempt writing that would never be published in mainstream magazines, particularly in the Malayalam literary scene.

Post-lunch was one of the best sessions of the day with Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac, who spoke to Chandrahas Choudhury. Pola was funnyand modest and more importantly very well-read. Choudhury has a casual, deft approach to steering the discussion,especially as he’s known Pola for a while, and the conversation had some interesting tangents, such as Argentina’s reputation for being an avant-garde literary culture, the internet’s cultural position and possibly as a sentient being (??) and Pola’s own skeptical criticism of Latin America’s romanticised left-wing ideology. Pola is also a Nabokov fangirl. Respect! The end of the session involved some heavy referencing on other books exploring themes like formal inventiveness, internet architectures, exploring Third World violence, etc. I have a daunting list to refer to, and I higlhly enjoyed this session. A note to commend Chandrahas’ skill as a moderator, one of the very few goodnes in the festival, from what I can see, and he’s also one of the better bloggers on Indian literature at The Middle Stage.

It was at this time that I was slightly late to the Hari Kunzru session with Amitava Kumar, and snuck in at the back just in time to hear them start reading and talking on stage. I heard later that Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi did a controversial reading at another session.

While waiting for a session to finish at the venue where I next needed to be, I overheard snatches of Kapil Sibal’s session on his “poetry” collection. That his poems are terrible is no surprise, expected even. But what was unexpectedly heartening was the crowd that refused to play sycophant to Sibal’s preening personality. When you consider that Sibal was making statements like, “In my last book, I was still discovering myself. In this book, I hope you will see that I have found myself,” I felt like cheering when a woman in the audience Q & A grabbed the mic to ask, “Why can’t Sibal the poet talk to Sibal the politician?”, and a young girl asked the standard Anna Hazare question. The icing on the cake was hearing the ruckus when a man is supposed to have jumped on stage, and on having Namita Gokhale reprimand him quipped back in a poetic couplet, and then proceeded to complain about his lack of education, and how poor he is, and at a point, he burst into tears. A nonplussed Sibal started mouthing political lines like “I understand your pain, I represent people like you,” and that was the end of the session. Let me add, I second Manu Joseph’s comment in his Open magazine piece, that it is appalling that Sibal would think it was okay for him to speak at JLF when Rushdie was clearly pressured and feared into not doing so, but nothing like some good trolling to cheer you up.

Finally, the Imagining India session began with Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal and academic and writer, Sunil Khilnani. I was hoping Tejpal’s intellect would make this a riveting session but it quickly disintegrated into an India-lavishing session with atejpal saying things like “India has been the most unique creative experiment in the last 1000 years,” and “India had the most brilliant set of founders”. I found Teal’s aggrandising hard to take after a while.It’s hard to imagine someone could be this lacking in historical perspective, and I’m not even the most diligent history buff. So I succumbed to my increasing weariness and left for the evening, just as the night revellers were beginning to arrive for the party to begin.

It was a bit ironic to be stuck in traffic with an auto guy on the way back to the hotel, who asked us if we were famous writers, and then proceeded to give us his own 2-paisa philosophy on what would make India more progressive, and I honestly thought he had his finger on a stronger pulse than Tarun Tejpal. The guy – who happens to be a college graduate – said quite simply, “India has a culture where rich people live off the woes of the poor people. The politicians were always like that, but now, the middle-class man has also become like that. We will never progress unless that changes.”

I want to make a final comment on something unusual. Having attended a few literary events overseas, but none in India, I am bewildered by how fashionable the Indian literati seem to be. In the sense, that they are completely overdressed for people who are not authors or speakers in any of the events. There are innumerable women walking around with Chanel handbags and Prada shoes, and in anarkali sakwars and full-suited corporate armour and I’m wondering if there was a memo about the dress code somewhere that I missed?

Anyway, tomorrow, I look forward to some discussions on transgressive, politically dissenting literature, and I’m hoping the sessions will be worthwhile. More coming, so watch this space.

Most of the stuff I have seen around the web are reviews of K’s set of short stories (Memories of the Future also out as Seven Stories ), seven of which are in translation and circulation. But there’s hardly much on the Internet about my favourite from the lot: The Branch Line.

The Branch Line begins with a man daydreaming in a train compartment:

Imagine a country or a world where outermost thoughts closest to the skull would occasionally, by dint of proximity, stray up under the crowns of hats, under their leather linings, trivial thoughtlets whose flight from head to hat would go unnoticed by people’s thinking, then…

And then:

Falling across Quantin’s thought like the shadow of a lowered semaphore, a downy sound grazed his ear.
“All dreams, please.”
Quantin looked up. Under the conductor’s canting a red beard bubbled, and through the beard, a smile.
“Be so kind as to have your dreams ready.”

And so, Quantin, having traded his dream for an unknown destination finds himself in a strange town, where people hunt shoals of clouds; a man shimmies up an electricity pole and strums a melody on the wires, bursting into song; shops sell strange things like utopia; and an ominous stranger gives advice such as:

… don’t wear your head out on your shoulders. First it gets an idea then it gets the ax. And they’re evn. The head with the Head, I mean.

All this probably sounds strange and nonsensical, but the tale is just marvellous, the writing just brilliant and wonderful.

Quantin then spots an advertisement endorsing the benefits of heavy dreams (emphasis his).

The main advantage of the heavy industry of nightmares over the light industry of golden threads plunged into brain fibrils, over the production of so-called sweet dreams, is that in marketing our nightmares we can guarantee that they will come true, we can hand our customers ‘turnkey dreams.’ Sweet dreams cannot withstand reality, sleep reveries wear out faster than socks; whereas a heavy dream, a simple but well-made nightmare, is easily assimilated by life….

… our nightmares weighing as they do on the brain, gradually form a sort of moral ceiling that is always about to come crashing down on one’s head: some of our customers call this ‘world history’. But that’s not the point. The point is the durability, unwakeability, high depressiveness, and wide availability of our nightmares: mass-market products good for all eras and classes, nighttime and daytime, moonlight and sunlight, closed eyes and open.

Krzhizhanovsky called himself a crossed-out person, known for being unknown. Certainly, he remains in the shadowy corners of banned Soviet-era literature. But reviews have made their way across several blogs online and continue to pop up every now and then.

Quantin’s nightmare-world is meant to be realistic, not some figment of his imagination, and it’s littered with a maze of unusual, frightening elements. He is an absent-minded clumsy, clueless Quantin, a Kafka-esque character in a Borgesian world. He is clueless even as he is alert. He wilfully navigates this maze, at one point even exulting in his role as a ‘scout’ for the lightless land of the night.

The reason this story stands out in my mind is because of some interesting allusions. Quantin is absorbed with the state and the powers it exerts over personal matters, of heart and of mind. In a way, it’s hugely reminiscent of Zamyatin’s We. Zamyatin’s character is subjected to a regime that kills individuality, love and finally, even his imagination. Quantin is a reflection of the boundaries that states transgress into. It raises several questions about the nature of modern states and their ways of control.

The story goes on to a nightmarish end, but the writing sparkles with a lyricism.

But the train’s speed — by a half-though, by a half-turn — was somehow outstripping logic. And then that warm wind, like a wing against one’s soul.

I think  - despite my above angle – it’d be a big mistake to read The Branch Line just as an allegory of Soviet Russia. For one, it has a strong unexplored artistic relevance to our times, in terms of quality of metaphor and a certain newness, an avant-garde spark. And second, it has layered meanings and understanding. It can make for many multiple rereads.

I must highly praise Joanne Turnbull’s excellent translation, particularly for what I imagine she is trying to retain, in the humour and impressiveness of those images at first read. Her introduction also does a great job at nudging you into te writing and the NYRB publishing is just beautiful. They’re becoming a huge favourite of mine for digging out translated rarities.

I hope to review more of the stories from MotF in the future, but I cannot recommend The Branch Line highly enough.

See also The Nation, The NYRB, wiki, The NY Times. The story “Yellow Coal,” from Seven Stories (trans. Joanne Turnbull), is online at openDemocracy.

I also love New York, with the sort of mad infatuation that only the really naive can have, I expect. So I’m especially excited by any art that can capture New York in a heartbeat and make you believe that the city is magic. Bollywood has been notoriously lax in comparison to Hollywood in this; I cannot recollect a single Bollywood film that makes New York memorable. But an unexpected song did manage to do that without even having New York as its central plotline.

If you’ve been to Times Square you’ll know it’s famous for lots of things, Broadway, the LCD  screens, the Red Steps, buskers, traffic, stores galore… there is too much to soak in and much of it glorious. But this song – Dil Gira  Kahin Darfatan - captures an essence of Times Square culture in 6 minutes, despite rolling in a film (Delhi-6) that is essentially about Delhi.

So in this song, a dreaming Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) wakes up in a soft dawn where Juma Masjid in old Delhi stands next to a transplanted Statue of Liberty. He is pretty sangfroid about this, even as he walks through deserted Delhi galis, and the green lady looms over the city like a spectre. Then he finds one of those charming old city gates that opens up – in true Bollywood style – to a Times Square that is both familiar and unfamiliar, with Bittu (Sonam Kapoor) at its centre.

The rest, you can watch for yourself in the video, but this year when I did visit Times Square for the first time, I felt as if Rakeysh Mehra had managed to pin down that elusive piece of magic that makes Times Square so spectacularly special. There are autos in his Times Square, alongside crazy drivers in Manhattan traffic. There is a sacred tree in front the of the One Times Square building, where the ball drops every New Years’. There are jalebi-walas frying up fresh fare to a giddy Bittoo, while a sacred cow is worshipped by Chandni Chowk residents transplanted to the Big Apple. Roshan is in his place, jogging while a mad crowd rushes around him. And then Bittu is on a cycle rickshaw, while a lovelorn Roshan follows pedalling his own colourful rickshaw. Then there is the Chandni Chowk madman, the one who holds up a mirror to all.

As it happens, I did spot cycle rickshaws when I was at Times Square too, with these guys:

Cycle rickshaws at Times Sq.

But it’s in the overall impression. Times Square has elements of India – the wild colours, the chaos, the mad traffic, the people taking their everyday lives to the streets.

Combine that with some of the imagery, it  is lingering. Roshan is falling in love. An American in spirit, his head cannot seem to help taking Bittu, his beloved, to the familiar places in his heart. Hence the transplant  - he wakes up an American in old Delhi, but sleepwalks into Times Square, an Indian in New York. And he’s not the only one.

Then the mirrors – the whole aspect of mirrors extends further through the song. An artist paints Bittoo with the pigeons in a lifelike canvas, which then comes alive as the real Bittoo, as if in a window. And then she morphs back into a live painting. Seeing this in Times Square with the massive  LCD screens, it feels like mirrors and windows abound infinitely in a Chandni Chowk-Times Square parallel universe.

Even the Black Monkey subplot (horrible in the film, but not so much in the song), does not intrude jarringly here, but instead fits in with the alternate New York, bringing to mind a silly, softer King Kong.

And all along, there are lyrics full of poetry:

Dil gira kahin dafatan,
(The heart fell somewhere, suddenly)
jaane magar yeh nayan.
(but these eyes, they know).
Teri khamosh zulfon ki gehraiyaan
(In the depths where your silent hair)
hai jahaan dil mera uljha hua hai wahiin,
(is, my heart is entangled right there,)
kho gaya.
(lost).
Tu magar hai bekhabar, hai bekhabar.
(But you, remain unaware, remain unaware).

Woman singing in the background: Kyun goonj rahi hain dhadkan?
(Why are my heartbeats echoing?)

Seepiyon ke honth se moti chhalak rahe hain,
(From the lips of shells, pearls spill)
ghazalon ki sohbat mein geet bhi behek rahi hain,
(Under the influence of ghazals, songs also go astray)
samandar lehron ki, lehron ki chaadar odh ke,
(The ocean, wearing a blanket of waves, of  waves),
so raha hai.
(is sleeping).
Par main jagoon, ek khumaari, ek nasha sa,
(But I stay awake, a euphoria, an intoxication)
ek nasha sa ho raha hai
(an ecstasy is occurring).
 Tu magar hai bekhabar, hai bekhabar. 
(But you, remain unaware, remain unaware).

More evidence is hardly required to showcase A. R. Rahman’s versatility, but this song — with the occasional wail of a Chinese mandolin, liberal use of Celtic fiddles and some excellent string work accompanying Ash King’s vagabond voice — does so brilliantly. Rumours say that Rahman heard King busking on the streets of London and thought his voice had the perfect texture for this song, and recorded with him despite King’s non-knowledge of Hindi.

If you like Rahman as much as I do, then you  too should be unhappy that there are few filmmakers who do justice to Rahman’s music with  equally good cinematography. Okay, maybe hard to do equally good, but few manage to do some justice to filming the songs. Dil gira dafatan  for me, is one of the few that manages to make the cut.

Photo courtesy: Yahoo! News India

If we were asked five years ago, what kind of Indian people would see as a reformative role model for the 21^st century, many would have said a young, dashing heir to a political dynasty or a loudly articulate NGO activist of some sort. Few, if at all any, would have predicted a 72-year old Gandhian villager. And yet, the youth of India have proclaimed such a man the new Messiah with all the vigour and noise they can summon. Anna Hazare has become the unexpected poster boy for revolution.

In the last week, the masses have taken to the streets in numbers and a passion that has been scarcely observed in independent India. People have taken off from work, school and universities to express solidarity with a 72-year old man fasting in a maidan in far-off Delhi. The question is why? Popular media has not stepped beyond the obvious non-sequiturs – ‘Enough is enough’, ‘There is an Anna Hazare in all of us’, ‘India’s second freedom struggle’ – the last coined by the man in the topi himself. Is it enough of an explanation? Could it really be that simple?

The choice of Anna is an odd one. On the surface, young people between the ages of 18-30 in India are more often seen touting Che Guevara t-shirts than reading up on histories of revolutions. We have been the biggest beneficiaries of shiny economic progress – our access to iPads, designer shoes and A-league universities has never been better. Yet our experience with the system and governance nationally has also never been more frustrating.

So it is not an underprivileged, oppressed people that are taking to the streets, but an empowered, privileged mob – people who are capable of articulate and verbose snatches of TV fame.

There is little presence of the malnutritioned, diseased or economically backward classes in the Ramlila Maidan; instead news channels are full of sound bytes by jeans-and-topi clad young boys and girls babbling excitedly in English of their enthusiasm and passion.

Somehow, Anna appeals to Gen Y. Somehow, young India sees him as their leader, bridging all class, linguistic and regional divides. Somehow, young India, after witnessing the Arab Spring has finally found a revolution it can claim and fight for.

In his analysis of the recent London riots, Slavoj Žižek states ‘…The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.’

I can’t help but see similarities in the London riots and the Indian monsoon uprising. The discourse around Anna Hazare’s protests has been enormously tilted to convince us that corruption is why the people have inevitably taken to the streets. That corruption has become a universal objective reality in the Indian lifestyle. But like Žižek, I am of the opinion that an objective notion of corruption ignores the implicit realities of people’s subjective conditions. Where Londoners’ subjective sociocultural realities led to explosions of anger targeting retailers, the average Indian’s individual disenfranchisement in politics has led to an equally explosive taking to the streets – albeit in a peaceful nonviolent manner.

We vote, but with little hope or eagerness; we pay taxes, but with too few expectations of benefits. So when Anna says ‘Don’t wait to vote once in four years; in fact, don’t trust in MPs enough to vote at all. Just take to the streets today and fight for your rights’, we all cheer raucously.

Žižek also quotes Zygmunt Bauman who characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’, and identifies that they were mostly a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. One can equally project this rationale that ‘defective and disqualified’ Indian citizens are manifesting their political desires of change of reform, unable to effect them in the ‘proper’ way of voting and trusting elected representatives to draft laws.

Finally, Žižek identifies what he calls the ‘spirit of revolt without revolution’, that there is a sentiment of authentic rage that doesn’t translate to an effective program of reform. We are rebelling against the UPA by deifying Anna Hazare, but we don’t know what we want to come after that. Are we really going to trust the government once the hoopla dies down?

In the days to come, there is no doubt that a political showdown of sorts will occur. Even now, the protests stand delicately poised on the edge of violence. All it needs is that little spark to fan it into a blaze. We can only hope that someone has the foresight to have skilled­­­­ firefighters in place in case it does. And that a few people hold on to a vision of what comes after, the revolution behind the revolt.

I didn’t end up at any mid-week sessions mostly because of the Schools Program (which I hope Melbourne’s schoolkids never take for granted — my school back home didn’t even let us select our own books at the little library, while these kids get to listen to their favourite authors at a Writers’ Festival), but also because I did work in between.

So, the session that kicked off the rest of my Festival weekend was the session Writers, Readers and Dali. I had probably blown this session up more in my head than I should have, so it felt oddly flat. A bunch of us met at the National Gallery of Victoria’s plush Members’ room, greeted with champagne and an array of Australian art displayed on their walls. And the talk commenced with NGV curators talking about Australian art, and the Dalí exhibition currently on display till October. [I truly hope to write another blog post on the Liquid Desire exhibition -- Dalí has always been one of my favourite artists, and this gallery exhibit has been intellectually riveting and a personally moving experience for me.] The session was invaluable in guiding me to more of Dalí’s writings — 3 of his autobiographies (oh yes, the man took himself seriously), a novel Hidden Faces and a sort of guide to artists called 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship. The last seems to be a bombastic and unbelievable elaboration of how, in order to be a true deliverer of the artistic muse, the artist must be born in Spain and have the first name Salvador. I do want to get my hands on a copy of all of these books though. Oh, when will I win the lottery?

The next session I attended was a regular Writers’ Festival kind with writers talking on their characters, called On the Edge. Some of the points raised were interesting, but the show-stealer was clearly Hitomi Kanehara whose recent novel Autofiction has garnered a lot of interest by the Japanese media for combining autobiography with fiction, taking the confessional memoir to a new level. Kanehara is first, just fascinating to look at. My first thought was “Ohmygod, she is skinny”, which I then thought was explained when she mentioned she had decided at a certain point to take on an eating disorder to portray her character more efficiently. And after, I was not sure it was an explanation at all. She also seemed surprised everytime someone wanted to ask her a question, which I found endearing — she had to communicate with an interpreter  the whole time, so the surprise may just have been natural. But there was just something very… still about her personality that made her interesting to watch. As I am normally a twitchy person, it may just have been curiosity. But Autofiction and Kanehara’s other fiction seem have a strong influence of Murakami in them, which makes me cautious, as I don’t think they are as complex. However, she’d definitely be one writer to keep an eye out for.

Next session — Put Your Hands All Over My Body. Erotica has become a recent interest of mine –  a friend of mine has an enthusiasm for Nin’s Delta of Venus that got me into reading more of the kind, and I have to admit, I am hooked. And boy, was I glad this session was at the Writers’ Fest, because the speakers made it worth my while. Apart from pointing me to the ways of a number of erotic writers I hadn’t yet heard of, the discussion raised a lot of questions I wanted answers to — for instance, did the speakers think there was any difference between pornography and erotica? Did women soften erotica (as claimed by the recent British magazine editor of Erotic Review, which you can find here)? Does sex for women have an association to guilt, which is why it makes for popular reading? The answers were diverse and emphatic. Linda Jaivin who sounds as bold as she looks (she has a head of bright red hair) believed there was no difference between porn and erotica, and the definitions seemed to revolve around the medium. She also believed women could be as sexual as men, and definitely capable of guilt-free sex. Nikki Gemmell was obviously the most reserved — she had the standard belief that erotica was more ‘tender’ and that women did tend to go beyond the sex more. Her cringe-worthy “Sex can be spiritual, transcendent” viewpoint clashed markedly with Krissy Kneen who responded with her belief that a complete human connection to another person is impossible — and she wasn’t being depressing, just realistic from her own experiences (I agree!). Krissy Kneen was one of the best finds of the festival, for me. More soft-spoken and very self-assured somehow, she endorsed Jaivin’s understanding of erotica. Kneen’s sex-drenched memoir Affection just came out, and I was queueing up with everyone else to get my copy signed. Kneen has a way with words that make your mind feel like it’s another sensory organ; it is quite delightful. For a fun evening, check out her blog FuriousVaginas.

The next day was a single session on Reading Essayistically, a philosophy talk that expounded on the ethics of reading in an open-ended way. I liked this session — Michelle Boulous Walker emphasised the idea that reading should orient readers (who become philosophers) in a horizontal way than putting him/her above it, in a vertical understanding. So there are possibilities of ethical spaces and relationships to what we read, instead of a finality of knowledge. And it prepares us to return to the text again and again, understanding it in a different way each time. A lot of the argument made sense to me, and particularly when an audience member raised the question of how universities regard essays, as sides that students take and formulate convincing arguments for. And Walker agreed that instead of open-ended ruminations, universities seemed to instituionalise knowledge. Open-ended reading however, was the way for readers even without an academic reading to become part of the processof knowledge, and that is where academic discourse should be heading. Walker quoted liberally from a number of philosophers I was unfamiliar with — Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Simone Weil… I have a lot more reading to catch up on now.

The last day of the Festival saw me in two very diverse sessions – Raiding the Attic: Where do Creative Ideas Come From? and In the Name of the Father: Monotheism and Fundamentalism. Raiding the Attic had a diverse panel of artists – an installation artist, poet, writer and a visual artist. Interesting session, mainly because the intertextual nature of art was a core point of each artist, and when I asked them about the question of originality — something most journals or small publishers stress when inviting work — all were solidly i agreement that originality should never be the goal of a work of art. Sue Dodd mentioned that important ideas tend to recur, and that one must chase those ideas. All also endorsed the act of daydreaming as a form of work where ideas start to flow — always good to have an excuse.

The last session was on religion, as the name suggests, and Russell Grieg highlighted how religion has now tended to resurface because he examined it as an object of Freudian repression, and that manifested in the unconscious and would inevitably manifest itself in the public space at some point. People made the mistake of assuming that science was slowly eliminating the significance of religious phenomenon, but in reality it lurked in the collective subconscious and in times of difficulty would resurface as a defence. The session was not too bad, though I wish Grieg could have gone a little deeper in the half hour that he was allotted.

Phew! This took a while. as expected I have a pile of books yet to be read, and am significantly poorer than I had hoped. But I walked off towards my tram that evening feeling very rich intellectually. There is something of a festive atmosphere even in a Writers’ Festival, in that everyone seems so celebratory about things. It will be quite missed.

So hopefully next, I will try to post about the Dalí’s exhibition — even more hopefully, before it closes on October 4th.

And I am also peripherally involved in Deakin University’s Exposure festival, which depending on how it goes I may post on too. Ah, September feels like a slow month…

The Melbourne Writers’ Festival 2009 kicked off last weekend, and how! It’s been a jam-packed program, and I thought I should give a rundown of some of the excellent and some um-ah sessions I attended.

Let me say, my focus this time was less on writing sessions and more on the academic-ish ones. Maybe it’s withdrawal from not having been in uni for a while, but I had a yen to attend sessions I wouldn’t think of attending otherwise, like on theoretical physics and erotica.

The highlight of the Festival so far, has been hearing Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader talk on a number of issues regarding the past, forgiveness, condemnation and reconciliation. Schlink was also a judge, so there was a strong legal element to the sessions. And of course, controversy too. The session Guilt about the Past: A Response where Schlink’s keynote speech was addressed by philosopher Raimond Gaita, and CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler, had a particularly high element of tension to it.

First let me say, I am a young Indian, brought up a long way (and a long time away) from mainland Europe and its history. My knowledge of World War II and the Holocaust began on a roadtrip to some obscure Indian town when I was 10 and my father, running out of his usual stock of mythological epics and fairy tales, decided history would make for an interesting narrative. The Holocaust remained with me for a long time as this other-worldly depiction of good vs evil, victims and perpetrators, the Allied and the Axis  Powers. It was years before my reading and my education directed me to an understanding of the war that was more political and less polar.

This session was therefore, illuminating. The details will take up more space than I can afford, but for now, let me say, that there were a lot of audience members of Jewish background who took on Schlink and his expressions of guilt in Germany, particularly post-war, with a lot of disgruntlement and borderline resentment. There were uncomfortable questions asked, particularly with reference to Schlink’s refusal as a German to contribute an opinion to modern Israeli politics. “We need to talk about the past. We need to talk about the Holocaust, as Germans and as Jews to reach any level of understanding,” one (Jewish, I presume) audience member declared. But Schlink refused to comment.

I can only recollect walking away from the fabulous BMW Edge auditorium with an overwhelming relief that I was neither German nor Jewish. I am not sure I have it in me to walk in the shadow of World War II for as long as I live. But there was also a niggling POV that I am still part of history, that as humanity, mass murder, genocide, and the Holocaust were all of our burdens in small ways if not big. Raimond Gaita highlighted this point when he took Hanna’s plaintive question in The Reader where she asks the judge what he would have done, and stated that the question places a false onus on humans as all being capable of evil. Clearly, he said, some people in the most extreme circumstances, during the Holocaust and the Nazi occupations, resisted evil, even when faced with horrors and death. And if some are capable, then all can be capable.

I have been avidly consuming a lot of Gaita’s writings, ever since I was introduced to his essay Justice and Hope in the collection of the Best Australian Essays for 2006. Gaita is a moral philosopher and academic, and has a perspective of good and evil from rational and humanistic points of view. I have been yearning for an opportunity to hear him speak, so when I saw his name pop up more than once in the Program, I promptly booked myself in for his other session too, called Why I read where he shared the stage with Alice Pung [The Unpolished Gem] and Steven Carroll [The Time We Have Taken].

Carroll and Pung were both remarkably honest and articulate about their literary influences, and very personal. And so was Gaita, who read an excerpt from his memoir Romulus, my Father on events in his early childhood that drew him to marvel this world as depicted in books, and at this point something curious happened to me. I got ridiculously emotional. Feeling idiotic that I now was hardly paying any attention to what Gaita was saying (thankfully, it only went on for a few more minutes, and the session wrapped up), I wondered if I could approach Gaita and thank him for his words, but certain I would babble something even more embarrassing than my state of mind, I fled.

Sitting outside painted in light and shadow, as I tried to put my chaotic thoughts into order, my friend A who lives in Missouri, called me hoping to chat. Timing can be so ironic, and I can’t remember what I said to postpone the talk.

Now to some of the other sessions, that were less memorable. I attended Monash Uni’s philosophy session Searching for Civilisation by John Armstrong, with whom I seemed mostly opposed in ideology from. Armstrong talked mostly about a new definition of  ‘civilisation’ which is its best through its art and architecture (such as Renaissance Florence), and concluded that the world needed to reach that level of  ‘civilisation’ where citizens took on some form of collective responsibility for the betterment of their society. It all seems idealistic, but personally, I think the term’s usage has gone out of fashion, and I think Armstrong’s POV is simplistic in light of imperialism and developmental economics. But it was thought-provoking nonetheless.

The other philosophy session was with Dr. Dr. Neil Levy called Free Will and the Brain. Now this one was quite a doozie. Maybe it was because I was tired, or whether I was distracted or just a plain ignoramus, but ten minutes into the session I zoned out. Like out, out. I didn’t think I’d be as at sea as I was, having read enough of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and some Dennett to have some idea of the nature of the debate. The talk veered off into neuroscience and the way free will is perceived in the light of neurons and brain activity, and for the life of me, if you ask me to elaborate on more than that, I wouldn’t be able to. And my thinking, that maybe I wasn’t the only one so lost, was disproved easily enough at Q&A time, where everyone seemed to follow the discussion. So, my apologies to Dr. Levy.

Now the session I wrapped up last weekend with was the grand scientific one – Life, the Universe and Nothing with Lawrence Krauss. After the philosophy doozie, I was worried this would be another one, but thanks to Krauss’ obvious skill as a public speaker (and my engineering-nerd brother’s enthusiastic explanations to me of relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory) I could follow this one with relative (haha) ease. Krauss does know how to depress though — “We are utterly insignificant”, “Our brilliantly dynamic expanding universe will come to a standstill in a 100 million years” and “Depending on whether you’re an optimist or pessimist, every place is the centre of our universe, or no place is the centre of our universe.” If you ever get a chance to hear him speak (yes, this means you Prashanth) do so; I cannot recommend him highly enough.

I intend to leave the sessions for the second week for another post (even though I have attended two of them already and there’ll be lots to say) I’ll just wait till Sunday when I can hopefully round them up right.

In the meantime, it has been exactly one week since my brother landed  in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start a degree in Aerospace Engineering, and I have this strange theory in my head, where I feel like because the physical distance between us has doubled (he was in India till a week ago), I am now trying to stay in touch with him twice as often to compensate. Happy tourist-ing till your term starts, Prash!

I am also dreading the end of the MWF. What else on earth can I find to keep me going after it?

Still to come next week: Writers & Dalí, a sold-out rib-tickling session on erotica, Hitomi Kanehara and the psychology of her character, How to Read Everything Like You Read an Essay, Religion and whether we’re hardwired for it and raiding your attic of creativity!

If you’re looking for other insights into the Festival, please do check out official Festival bloggers Estelle Tang and the howlarious Simon Keck on the Festival Blog.