Indian Writing

From her poem “Another Paradise Lost: the Hindu Way”:

One sleepy summer afternoon, while helping
myself to a glass of chilled water, I saw a
snake lying curled under the fridge. It could
have been a very poisonous cobra. Very

quickly, I chose my mode of attack: Acid.
Staggering, I reached for the glass bottle
so that I could pour the yellow-green cheap
acid on its slimy body, burning it to death.

“Stop it”, the snake hissed in pure Tamil
connecting with me in the language of
my prayer and poetry. “I am an exile.”
And I configured mental images of political

refugees. It wriggled out and I saw that
it was balding, almost Rushdie-like, perhaps
with a death sentence too. Controversy was a
crowd pulling catch-phrase, to which I dutifully

succumbed. Acid bottle in hand, I heard the
snake preach to me about living in detachment.
“The perfection of life is when you do not
know the difference between yielding and

resisting.” The scrawny being writhed further
and told me of rebirth and reincarnation. Being
a writer I really wanted to take notes. Instead
I began arguing. “Shut up”, the snake said to me…

The whole thing here.

The bus conductor
Pushed me out
As I was leaning on a foot board
For support
In an open public bus
Going somewhere
In Mumbai city
In the early
Twenty first century
Thinking about
A Malayalam poem
In English.

by Hrishikesan P B, from Muse India.

I had written about Mamang Dai’s fiction here and here.

Here is a poem by Mamang, The Sorrow of Women, which I discovered in Muse India:

They are talking about hunger.
They are saying there is an unquenchable fire
burning in our hearts.
My love, what shall I do?
I am thinking how I may lose you
to war, and big issues
more important than me.

Life is so hard, like this,
Nobody knows why.
It is like fire.
It is like rainwater, sand, glass.
What shall I do, my love,
If my reflection disappears?

They are talking about a place
Where rice flows on the streets
About a place where there is gold
in the leaves of trees,
They are talking about displacement,
When the opium poppy was growing
dizzy in the sun
happy, in a state of believing –

And they are talking about escape,
about liberty, men and guns,
Ah! The urgency for survival.
But what will they do
Not knowing the sorrow of women.

(Second post in the Why Does This Irritate Me series)

Kerala.
Houseboat.
Smell of curry.
Bollywood.
The voice at the other end of the line:

- when your Internet connection went down. Or when you upgraded your system software and your PowerPoint files wouldn’t open. Or when your @*#%! PC wouldn’t talk to your &^%$*^@ printer.

First-ever love marriage in the family (the Western way).

Krishna wore black jeans and a football jersey, and he took a “snap” of me, as he called it, with the most tricked-out camera-phone I’d ever seen. His bride was a touch more traditional: She was dressed in a stunning salwar kameez, a pants-dress of blue silk, and walked three or four paces behind us, letting her husband do the talking. When I tried to bring her into the conversation, she flashed a shy smile and deferred to Krishna.

And the lesson:

Next time I’m on the line with tech support, I’ll have a face to go with the voice — not specifically Krishna’s or Meenakshi’s, but someone just like them. And no matter how frazzled I am, no matter how badly I want to put my fist through the computer screen, I’ll be calm and polite.

I shouldn’t have had to travel halfway around the world to discover this, but that voice on the other end of the line belongs to a real person with a real life. In fact, he or she may even have just celebrated their family’s first-ever love marriage.

The whole thing here.

Here’s the Daily Mail reporting on the ‘ill’ effects of feminism:

A study in Sweden, arguably one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, discovered that men and women who are equal are more likely to suffer illness or disability.

Those who earn the same are also more likely to become unwell or suffer a disability.

Why, you ask? Here’s one possible reason: “men’s health may be adversely affected by a loss of what had been seen as traditional male privileges.”

As for women, their health “could be damaged by greater opportunities for risky behaviour as a result of increased income combined with the stress of longer working hours.”

Therefore?

Sweden may have reached a critical point where further one- sided expansion by women into traditionally male roles, spheres and activities will not lead to positive health effects unless men also significantly alter their behaviour.

(Emphasis mine) Well, helllooooo…

Inequality, of course, must be good for everyone’s health.

****

Zoe Williams has a response:

The argument that feminism has undermined masculinity is strange since it suggests that, in order to show strength, men must see weakness manifested all about them; no matter if that weakness is faked or forced or cajoled. It’s a bit like Henry VIII demanding incredibly bad tennis from all his tennis chums. It might have made him feel better, but he’s not going to get any better at tennis, is he? In this ideological portrait, men cannot handle challenge, do not seek excellence and need to be indulged through lying. It interests, but doesn’t surprise me, that the people who most keenly hate women also seem to hate men. As a feminist, might I say that we don’t hate men. We believe all humanity to be as capable of greatness as the generosity of its nature and scope of its imagination will allow…

He doesn’t want to be “too sexist” about it and he knows he’s being “crass” in asking a group of professional journalists
(who happen to be women) about their choice of attire, but… Shashi Tharoor appeals to the women of India “to save the sari from a sorry fate.”

On recent visits home to India I have begun to notice fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser and even the Western dress-suit have begun to supplant it everywhere. And this is not just a northern phenomenon, the result of the increasing dominance of our culture by Punjabi-ised folk who think nothing of giving masculine names to their daughters.

Emma has a response here.

Also: Here’s Tharoor’s NYT op-ed on the Americans and cricket. (via Siddhartha of Sepia Mutiny)

“As India’s economy goes from strength to strength, and more of the country’s north becomes suburban and developed, travelling in the rural south becomes more attractive. Around my farm on the outskirts of New Delhi, new neighbourhoods are springing up full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only two years earlier was still billowing winter wheat.

In contrast, whole swaths of the south remain oddly innocent, unchanged and relatively unvisited. There are no malls here; instead the villages are still like those in R. K. Narayan stories with roadside shops full of sacks of dried red chilli and freshly cut stalks of green bananas; buffaloes sun themselves on the sandbanks of the Cauvery River; goats wander in the streets; and cyclists wobble along red-dirt roads, past village duckponds and palm groves. The villagers leave their newly harvested grain on the road to be threshed by the wheels of passing cars. Women in bright silk saris troop along the roads with jasmine flowers in their hair. The cattle are strong and white, and their long horns are painted blue.”

William Dalrymple travels to Thanjavur where “in the holiest innermost sanctuary of the temple… the Brahmins perform the evening arti, or fire ceremony, incanting their ancient Sanskrit slokas” and where “ancient ritual” requires that “only the most elite families of Brahmins” may cast bronze sculptures for the temples.

What is it about this piece that irritates me…

Again and again through the day
I meet a cat.
In the tree’s shade, in the sun, in the crowding brown leaves.
After the success of a few fish bones
Or inside a skeleton of white earth
I find it, as absorbed in the purring
Of its heart as a bee.
Still it sharpens its claws on the gulmohar tree
And follows the sun all day long.

Now I see it and then it is gone,
Losing itself somewhere.
On the autumn evening I have watched it play,
Stroking the soft body of the saffron sun
With a white paw. Then it caught
The darkness in paws like small balls
And scattered it all over the earth.

— Jibanananda Das

Translation Lila Ray. Poem courtesy Minstrels.

There were many lovely moments in Mira Nair’s film adaptation of The Namesake. This moment in the airport, for instance, reminds me of the time we flew from Calcutta to Bombay after the sudden death of my mother’s father. I also got a fleeting sense of what life might have been like for my parents, living in Calcutta in those years, far from their families.

And Tabu and Irfan were lovely to watch, despite the uneven accents.

But no, the Calcutta shown in the film wasn’t as well done as one might expect… and I don’t mean merely the carelessness of, say, an Indusind Bank signboard in what is supposedly Howrah station of the mid-seventies (yes, I’m like that about detail, sorry). I mean, in the context of the following statement by Nair in a television interview:

You know what happens when these phirangs come from abroad. They just don’t have any relationship with our country. Look what happened with City of Joy. You can fling millions of dollars at things but that doesn’t make it real. Or that doesn’t make it moving or truthful.

Yesterday we went across to Prithvi to see Girish Karnad’s new play, Flowers. Tickets were sold out - Saturday night in Juhu, and it’s a Karnad play after all - but past experience has shown us that someone or the other is generally looking to sell extra tickets, and yes, we were in luck. One by one, we got our tickets, and as we were early, we also managed to get good seats - mid-level this time, as Arundhati Nag advised those of us standing in line, because of the unusual set design.

There was the smoky fragrance of dhoop around us, and long ropes of blue light, as we waited for the play to begin. We didn’t have to wait long though, as plays at Prithvi generally start on time.

This Rangashankara and Rage co-production has been directed by Roysten Abel with Rajit Kapoor performing the 90-minute monologue. The visually breathtaking set design, by Roysten Abel and executed by Shashidhar Adapa and Selva Kumar, consists of an elevated platform, such that the solitary character seated on it appears almost suspended in the air. Below him, on a stage scattered with tiny white jasmines, is an urli decorated with flower garlands. Just visible, in the shadowy darkness behind the urli, is a heap of jasmine flowers sloping gently over a Lingam.

The man sitting on the platform stands up, turns around to face us and begins to speak. The setting is a temple, and the man is standing above the temple tank. He is the temple priest who has been worshipping the Lingam for years, decorating it with fresh flowers every day, softening the black stone with daily worship, talking to it, even discussing contemporary politics with it. A married man, he lives with a devoted wife, children and old parents. One day a courtesan, Chandravati, comes to offer prayers at the temple. The priest is attracted to her. One day, when she does not appear in the temple, he goes to her house to find out the reason for her absence. She tells him that she is having her menstrual period. When he visits her house again, after two days, she has had her cleansing bath. She invites him to decorate her naked body with ropes of flowers, the way he has always been decorating the Lingam. Their affair continues like this, but one day, on the night of the play, the priest must confront his powerful conflicts - the pull of love on one side, and duty on the other; his love for Chandravati, his love for the Lingam, his loyalty to his chieftain, and his loyalty to his wife.

It’s not Karnad’s most powerful play - my favourites are Tughlak, Hayavadana, Nagamandala and Taledanda. I also felt that its English title, Flowers, didn’t quite fit for a play with such a serious theme. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful, moving work, with some superbly crafted sentences, a rising sense of conflict, and a fine, controlled plot - the hallmark of Karnad’s best work.

But for a 90-minute monologue, Rajit Kapoor’s performance was disappointingly lacking in feeling and energy. At times, he seemed to be reciting his lines, rather than enacting them with the passion of a conflicted, desperate man. I thought the play deserved better.

Why didn’t anyone tell me the movie was this much fun? Things I loved about this first film by Reema Kagti:
- the sub-plots, all six of them. My favourite pairs were Kay Kay-Raima and Shabana-Boman. My favourite sub-plot was the Aspi-Zara story (there’s a reason why they look so vacuous :)).
- that the couples came from different parts of India, and there was humour, but no one was just a trite caricature.
- the RJ capsules to tell the background stories of each couple. Lively narration by one of my favourite RJs, Harsh.
- the dialogues written by Anurag Kashyap. Some great lines there.
- the use of old Hindi film songs - Aandhi, etc etc. Very nice!
- Shabana Azmi. I’m always amazed at what she can do with a role, and what a pity that while there are more and more roles being written for the ageing Amitabh, new filmmakers haven’t tried to use Shabana’s incredible talents to their fullest.
- Boman Irani. I love that wacky story he tells the foreign tourist about how he and Nahid (Shabana) first met. And the way he goes “There! There!” at imaginary dolphins.
- the Boman-Shabana kiss - I think it’s my favourite smooch in Hindi movies, not that there are too many to choose from.
- the gay sub-plot, handled intelligently rather than in an eeeks-he’s-gay or nudge-nudge homophobic way.
- Raima Sen. Boxing, martial arts, paragliding, and good comic timing! I also liked Vikram Chatwal in his role, and Sandhya Mridul in hers.
- Kay Kay, Kay Kay, Kay Kay. He is superb as the melancholy Bong and even better when he cheers up…
- Kay Kay’s dance, on the ‘happiest’ day of his life. Here’s a video clip of Kay Kay and Co dancing to Sunidhi Chauhan’s marvelous Sajnaji Vari Vari.

Things I didn’t care for:
- the rest of Vishal-Shekhar’s music (other than Sajnaji and the use of old songs).
- the limited use of Ranvir Sheorey, who has far more talent than this role allowed him to show.
- the boring cinematography.
- the uneven pacing.
- Amisha Patel. Her performance, not just her role. I know she was supposed to be the clingy new bride and all, but the way she’d say “lollipop” was cringe-making.

Via email from Abodh:

She had an unwilling free ride from Borivali to Churchgate on the 6:19 am Churchgate slow from Borivali. We get a call early morning when she must have reached Khar about a dog, which must have been hurt and was moaning in the ladies first class compartment. We take down the details as in the train no and also calculate the ETA at Churchgate and rush to Churchgate station. We think it would be better taking the injured dog down out at Churchgate station than in the middle for want of time as the suburban train would halt very briefly at its various stops. We inform the Churchgate station master who is very helpful and checks on the whereabouts of the train. It seems that the train is just outside Churchgate station and is expected to arrive any moment on platform number two.

We rush onto the platform and wait at the point where the first class ladies compartment would be coming. The train comes to a halt. We check the train number on the compartment; it is the same one that the caller had given. We search the ladies compartment thoroughly… there is no dog. We then check the next compartment, yet no dog. We go back to the first one for a double check and she is sitting under the seat. We had missed her earlier as we had a grown up injured dog in our mind and not a two-month-old puppy. She lets out a whine and wags her tail. We take her out. She is very scared and confused but continues to wag her tail. We walk down the platform with her and show her to the station master, thank him and are off in a taxi and she sleeps soundly, tail wagging on the lap.

We thus decided to name her Bogie. She is too small to have climbed onto the train by herself. She must have been put in by some cruel person who dumped her in the train and had no empathy of what she would go through in the journey or where she would end up.

Bogie is being temporarily housed by a WSD volunteer and is looking for a good home and if you know anyone who would want her do call WSD on 23733433/9892974973 or e-mail wsd@wsdindia.org . She is brown with a black snout, has floppy ears and is adorable. She wags her tail all the time and should we say that she is used to traveling on a Mumbai suburban train?

For another thing—to sound a little Lawrentian for a moment—the old intimacy between people and the natural world has essentially disappeared from fiction, the line between human and nonhuman sometimes literally drawn in red ink: when William Maxwell wrote a (great) scene from a dog’s point of view in So Long, See You Tomorrow, his editors at The New Yorker wanted it cut on the grounds of sentimentality. The sentimental is a category like the pornographic, but more subtly enforced. Where did this new censorship originate, and how did it insinuate itself so deeply into literary practice? It is post-Lawrentian, and may be connected to his fall from grace. Unlike pornography, the sentimental seems not a consciously constructed and enforced social category, but a sort of fact, just as the ridiculous seems self-evidently ridiculous: it’s actually quite hard to explain why something is ridiculous. But someone writing a scene like that in Women in Love when a distraught Birkin shucks his clothes off and walks into the woods—”the soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft sharp needles”—would likely come in for ridicule, because solace comes to fictional characters now in many ways, but not through contact with living things, unless they’re human. Yet: why? Losing Lawrence, we relegate his list of necessary relationships—with “stone, earth, trees, flower, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures”—to outworn modes of fiction. If young writers can rarely name more than a dozen plants within a ten-mile radius of their writing desks, this isn’t seen as detrimental to their work’s verisimilitude, since the nonhuman world plays almost no part in contemporary fiction. It’s as if this silence in fiction anticipates a hundred thousand species’ extinction in the actual world. Lawrence would be enraged.

Elizabeth Tallent on D.H.Lawrence.

Back from Fort Kochi with a horrid bug. Too drowsy to post anything other than link to this news that the Bachchans attended the Namesake premiere with Aishwarya Rai “in toe”.

*****

And I had also bookmarked this ToI editorial for Intl Women’s Day that began with the statement that India might be poised (whatever that means) but its women are not. It offered this strategy to attack “this congealed conservatism”: to make the girl child an economically attractive option.

Right. Now I’m off to have my meds…

1498. Calicut. [Arrival.] That night (May 20) we anchored two leagues from the city of Calicut, and we did so because our pilot mistook Capna, a town at that place, for Calicut. Still further there is another town called Pandarani. We anchored about a league and a half from the shore. After we were at anchor, four boats (almadias) approached us from the land, who asked of what nation we were. We told them, and they then pointed out Calicut to us. (more…)

I forget what I was looking for when I came across this lovely poem by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out in the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

At the MAMI festival, last weekend, we saw the following films, some for the first time, some for the most amazing repeat viewing:

- Isaki Lacuesta’s Legend of Time, which is a quintessentially festival film…

- Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (Jai Dharmendra, as Utpal Dutt says at the end; and the film is the nicest tribute to Hindi movies, but why did the Bhabhi disappear into the kitchen and never return from there?)

- Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, which is a nice film adaptation of Alice Munro’s story The Bear Came Over the Mountain

- Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Five and Six.

- half of an Italian film with lots of killing, hugging and screaming (we walked in late because we were coming from the IMAX to Fun Republic - what an optimistic name - and decided to have lunch at Little Italy, where we lingered over the great food. We had only been planning to reach in time for the Almodovar, but the Italian film did seem very entertaining, and we were sorry to have missed the first half)

- and Volver!!

Luffed it.

*****

Off to Fort Kochi tomorrow. Puttu-kadala, Chinese fishing nets, backwater cruise, here we come.

I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. “‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn’t read your poem. And that cypress that you’re sitting under hasn’t been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I’d also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you’re planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you’ve already expressed? Or maybe you’re tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it’s fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you’ll say, ‘I’ve written everything down, I’ve got nothing left to add.’ There’s no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself.”

From Wislawa Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture.

Self-immolation by Afghan women trapped in oppressive circumstances seems to be on the rise.

Fourteen pages of the commission’s report are dedicated to brief descriptions by family members of reasons these women committed suicide. Most are because of rape, beatings and accusations against their honor.

Despite arguments that, among other things, “female judges might become pregnant while serving on the bench and that would affect the judiciary’s prestige”, Egypt has, for the first time, appointed 31 women judges.

In the UK, a new report reveals that Black and Asian women find it harder than white women to get jobs.

EOC chair Jenny Watson said: “Young Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black Caribbean women are ambitious and equipped for work, but they are still suffering even greater penalties at work than white women. Time after time women told us about the ‘unwritten rules’ in their workplace, hidden barriers that prevent them from realising these ambitions. Without tackling these unwritten rules, change will never come.

In Iran, anti-stoning activists are being detained.

In England, a debate about women’s prisons.

And in St. Louis, renovations at Busch Stadium will ensure that women will have as many restrooms as men.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that those changes will put the new stadium in compliance with a state law the stadium’s architects didn’t know existed last year. Enacted in 1995, the law requires that sports stadiums and other large public venues have as many toilets for women as it has toilets and urinals for men.

Distinguished Kashmiri poet Rehman Rahi has won the Jnanpith award.

Brief bio here. Here are two of his poems in translation.

And here, translated by Ghulam Rasool Malik:

Inklings From the Dark

Yesternight, my sleep driven off and the thread of my fancies slit,
I espied an eagle in the wild shadows of my mind:
On its beak, in the same old fashion, smouldered the blood of the dove
Whose feathers were shed by hilltops into the atmosphere.
Turning my head on the pillow, I sighted a deep, dark, chasm
And rose and leaned my back against the wall, with the cool of the winter in the
marrow of my breast.
My lips froze dry as whisperings reached me from outside the window.
The snowflakes were sailing into the shelter of the crevices.
Not a mouse did creep from under the box to the store-cabinet.
In place of my upper garment a cat hang by the hanger.
Rubbing my eyes, I tried to pull the quilt upto my cold back,
But O, the kangri shook and the cold, hapless ashes kissed my feet
While the owl hooted outside, “O, woe to you, O woe!”
Fain would I have raised a cry of lament, had my heart stood by me.
Suddenly I called to my mind my darling son —
How raptly did he listen to my bed-time tale last night
When I told him of the agony of the oyster in her travails!
But he only heard part of the tale when sleep overtook him.
I rose like a moonstruck man and turned on the light
And found him lying by the wall like a mushroom on the mount,
In deep slumber, with fragrant blossoms blooming on his lips,
And a drop of sweat, dawned afresh, playing on his brow.
Perchance he was dreaming the rest of the tale!
Perchance the oyster had laboured forth a pearl!

In The Telegraph, this appeal for contributions toward a young woman’s treatment.

Kiran Nagarkar on reading in public:

I did my first reading in public at the age of 50. Till then I had stubbornly refused to appear on TV, not even as a mute participant, not even when my first novel in Marathi was being discussed, or when my play Bedtime Story ran into serious censorship problems.

Now, finally, I was making my debut and there were notices being put up all over the University of Chicago. The organisers (or was it just me?) were expecting between a hundred and two hundred people at the minimum, but the public turned out to be all of four professors from the University who had obviously been coaxed or coerced to come out of pity for an over-sensitive author who might be terminally traumatised and take it into his head never to speak or write again.

Jerry Pinto on the A-list:

Let’s go to the A-List table,” said an author at Neemrana, some years ago and left the table where a couple of poets and other Indian writers were sitting.

And while we can sneer at his social climbing, the media aren’t much better. A weekly news magazine said that the Kitab festival has no A-list authors. I don’t know what that means. I think it means: no millionaire writers. I think it means: none of the Big Advance Boys. I think it means: if you’re writing a book and you have some ideas, we of the media have no time for you. Only call us if someone is willing to pay you a few hundred thousands or more.

We don’t invent the A-list any more. The marketing johnnies decide. Take the case of Kaavya Viswanathan
What happened to the idea of the book itself? What happened to the idea of the counterculture, that there could be something we were interested in that has nothing to do with how many dollars someone thought it was worth?

And Farrukh Dhondy at Kitab:

It wasn’t a vanity book-fest. There were lively sessions on the state of journalism, on censorship and the radical media, and on the translation of fictional works for the screen. There were writers such as Deborah Moggach, Esther Freud and Geoffrey Dyer reading and speaking.

A couple of newspapers were unfair to Kitab. One journalist, who had probably never heard of Deborah, Geoffrey or Esther implied (in a publication called, I think, The Weekly Azaan) that the festival was a failure because there were no ‘A-listers’. The organiser, Pablo Ganguli, replied saying that he was concerned with cultural debate and not with vulgar alphabetical lists. Being one of the writers invited, I should perhaps take not being on the Azaan’s ‘A’ list as a slight to my long and happy career. In fact, I couldn’t care less.

Jerry Pinto again, at Kitab:

“Where is Jessica Hines?” I asked an organiser.

“She can’t make this panel,” she said.

No, she couldn’t. Not unless she had a clone. She was at Max Mueller Bhavan, reading from her book. This must be the only time a speaker has been cross-booked by the persons in charge of the festival.

But what was our panel about?

I had been told it was about how the media determine issues of gender.

Our moderator announced that we were there to speak about genre.

Farrukh Dhondy raised his eyebrows.

“Gender is genre,” said Hoshang Merchant, the gay poet from Hyderabad.

C.P.Surendran at Kitab:

The evening before, Nick Pearson, editorial director of Fourth Estate, UK, released my book of poems, Portraits of the Space We Occupy, and I sorely suffered from a hangover from my own reading for the next twenty-four hours. The collection was launched at Oxford Book Shop, Churchgate. What this really means is that just as you begin to read, the grinder goes into action at the Cha Bar at your elbow on your right. And of course the mike, as er, has its own agenda. So what you read comes out as a vengeful gurgle.

In between poems, I catch sight of Amit Chaudhuri, the brilliant writer and singer, who are also the president of Kitab Board, at the Cha Bar. I gesticulate wildly at him. The mike, the mike, I mime endlessly like a moron. But Amit coldly looks through me. His eyes glint. Is he thinking of a review of mine of one of his works?