Haha, it’s literature festival season. I love them to death. In his 12 years from Adyar, one of India’s top 3 non-best-selling authors, so far, I have attended 14 literary festivals across the country. From my native village of Chennai, trains, planes, buses, cars and sometimes mules have brought me to these fascinating places. If I remember correctly it was from Bangalore. Organizers thought it was the best way to beat the city’s notorious traffic jams. Riding the pillion with me at the time was a South Indian author who, in his first literary outing, wrote a book on Ayurvedic methods for success in the stock market. I managed to rank him and sit in the front.) Today Mule and I are in touch on WhatsApp and he/he is helping me edit my next book.
At these literary endeavors (which I look forward to with bated breath each year), I participated primarily as a speaker. Part of the woofer. And, as a RAC candidate, he decided to join Ernest Hemingway and Barbara Cartland in the middle of the session, standing in for a participant who was in a coma, just in case the conversation lulled. . Suffice it to say that the writer made it and wrote three more books while still in a coma.
Literature Festival is a great opportunity for those who are not familiar with literature, we writers are aspiring, who were in the past, who never existed, who are there again, 3 Bengalis, 2 Keralites, and It’s the place to go to mingle with Bollywood personalities available for the year. And presiding over the contingent are two or three obligatory white people given the best suites at the hotel.
The 1 hour session was stimulating and I learned a lot about different subjects. At one literary festival alone, a prominent author spoke widely and with great authority about enemas. . In the next session, a senior writer in a nostalgic mood made constant references to memories of times gone by. After a lengthy introduction to how women feel about the looks that men cast on them in the session on “Women and Modernity,” the moderator turned to the only male journalist and writer on the panel. , asked him to go first. The man replied, “Could you tell me the four options?”
Finally, an audience member gasped for 10 minutes about the British conspiracy behind why Vada has holes and Bonda doesn’t. great stuff.
But what everyone really looks forward to at Lightfest is the elegant soiree that the organizers put on the evening. It’s time for us writers to celebrate the day’s selfless literary outpouring by eating hard chicken snacks and munching on fake Black Label. It’s the perfect time to line up and thank the festival’s curators.
So far, I’ve taken the foolproof method. As soon as you stumble, shove past other eager Bieber writers, and come within brown-nose distance in the curator’s ear, you softly whisper, “You look like George Clooney.” Works like a bloody charm, I say. At one point, I didn’t realize that the curator was a woman, probably because of the 6th fake black label. But boy, I was quick. I quickly added, “Before he transitioned.”
she was delighted. I wonder why she didn’t invite me again.
At one literary festival I went to, I found writers complaining about how frugal the breakfast buffet was with nothing but cereal, boiled eggs, and dry toast. I was stunned as I was eating crispy masala dosas made with ghee, eggs to order, sausages, five types of bread, and exotic fruit-flavoured yoghurt every day. I cleverly stuffed those muffins into the writer’s bag.) It turned out that I had inadvertently attended a grand five-day wedding celebration at the same hotel. Belated congratulations to Sai Sushrut and her Divyavarshini. Have a glorious married life.
In conclusion, I think there are too few literary festivals in India. Floating logs, morgues, random sinkholes on city streets, hospital waiting rooms, disputed border towns, abandoned places and more, more innovative spaces that have never been used before. should have more. plant…
Haha, I love Lightfest.
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