Squeezing It All Into One Line: The Jaipur Literary Festival 2012

It is extremely tempting to try and summarize the wildly intense, brain-and-sensory overload that was the JLF 2012 in a series of one-liners, not least because there were quite a few memorable ones..

They ran from the imperative-
'dance naked! do it now!' (Hoshang Merchant, Indian writer of Gay fiction)

to the critical-
'[Obama's] Nobel Prize was a prize for not being George Bush' (David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker)

to the philosophical-
'Sikhism is not something of the hereafter, it is about living the right way in this world. A kind of detachment in attachment.' (Navtej Sarna, writer and diplomat)

to the historical-
'Hitler and Stalin did not inherit absolute power the way that Peter the Great did, they rose to it - it's not lunacy or moral imbecility, it's great people skills.' (historian Simon Sebag Montefiore)

to the metaphorical-
'turn your body into ink and your mind into paper, then turn your bones into a pen' (The Vision of the Gurus session)

to the scatological-
'Purgatives are like purgatory, they almost make you believe' (Indian writer R. Raj Rao)

to meditations on journalism and power-
'the job of journalism is to put pressure on power' (David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker)

on journalism and literature-
'there is only so far journalism can go, and then literature takes over' (Jason Burke, journalist and writer)

or just on journalism-
'Somebody won't often be able to give you a soundbite about their lives immediately. But if you shut up and follow them and spend the time, that truth will emerge.' (Katherine Boo, journalist and writer)

and then on how the internet is affecting the aesthetics of literature-
'the internet is our greatest living novel...it's the playground of millions' (Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac)

on modern identity politics-
'you're not purely anything anymore' (novelist Teju Cole)

and on how to write that play or novel you have inside you-
'Get rid of the delusion that you'll somehow do it by not doing it. Taking a walk or sitting by the pool isn't going to magic a play into existence.' (Tom Stoppard, playwright)

and finally, perhaps a snippet or two of Bakhti poetry

'God, My Darling,
Do me a favour
And kill my mother-in-law'

and

'Void is not devoid of God'


But of course, as the long list of quotes shows, not only have I failed to catch the festival in one line, I have failed to catch it in a few. And that really was what pushed this festival over the edge of being an experience you can process, post-portem, regurgitate and file away neatly, to being an experience that leaves an indelible mark and changes the scale of the way of you think.

It seems inevitable that the JLF will continue to grow, and I often heard it bandied about during the festival that next year, the organizers would have to shift to a larger venue, so I feel privileged to have been able to attend the festival while it was still (just about) Diggi-Palace-size. But I'm certain that however it grows, and whatever corporate sponsors and celebrity guests it succeeds in attracting, the next Jaipur Literature Festivals will still be about a 'curiosity about the internal life of words, and about the creative imaginations that give birth to them.' (Namita Gokhale, novelist and festival organizer)

What's more, and even better, the JLF, with its huge and uniformly enthusiastic number of attendees, its international participants and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, did and does 'testify in an uncomplicated way to the power of literature and what it can do.' (Teju Cole, novelist)

Above and below the hobnobbing and professional networking, and certainly beyond the persistent political controversy, the festival seems ultimately to be about interested, engaged and switched-on people coming together, ready to encounter the other through the written and the spoken word.

(For videos of the sessions, pictures and more info, go to http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/)

Anticipating Otherness

By a stroke of good fortune (otherwise known as my 80 year-old grandmother flying business class and getting us in), I am currently tapping away surrounded by the atmosphere of hushed luxury that attends to the King David Lounge in Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv.

I am about to board a flight for Mumbai, India, and from there to catch a domestic flight going north to Jaipur in Rajasthan. Once there, I will begin an intensive 4 or 5 days of literary activities taking place from dawn till dusk at the ‘democratic’ and colossal Jaipur Literature Festival. Along with up to 11,000 other people per day (the festival estimates it will have about 60,000 attendees in total), I will be privileged enough to hear international writers like Lionel Shriver, Ariel Dorfman, Michael Ondaatje and Tom Stoppard, have the opportunity to ogle Oprah, as well as meeting some of the best of local Indian talent, among them the distinguished and charismatic writer Navtej Sarna, who isn’t strictly local as he’s also currently the Indian Ambassador to Israel.

Right now though, all that remains in glorious, anticipatory obscurity. I’m expecting it all to be great, but I have no experience to compare it to, and truthfully, I could be listening to these writers anywhere. Instead, what’s really occupying my mind at this wonderfully relaxed moment of lounge transit where no one can touch me because I’m already, officially, traveling – is India.

It’s one of those places that everybody who goes to immediately falls in love with. Everyone seems to discover their inner, laid-back selves and instantly becomes convinced they could happily live on dahl and inner peace for the rest of their lives. “The colours!” they almost moan, “you’ve never seen anything like it”.

I have a secret confession. I’ve been to India before, and I didn’t love it. I liked it, sure, but most of the time I was too busy worrying about what all the rice and poppadums were going to do to my figure to have time to be taking it all in. I suspect I did India entirely the wrong way, with my father, sister and grand parents, with the whole trip planned from start to finish, from luxury hotel to hotel. I shouldn’t complain of course, but between my younger frame of mind and all the shining marble lobbies I doubt I quite connected correctly.

Still, I sometimes worry that I lack that gene, the travel one, that everyone my age seems to have as dominant instead of recessive allele. I just don’t feel that itch, that restlessness that sits in the skin and flares up sometimes to result in tickets booked and stunning Facebook pictures uploaded.

Yet, here I am, waiting to board a flight to one of the most exotic, exciting and enticingly multifaceted countries in the world. So I am anticipating otherness, and quite thrilled to be doing so. I fell into this visit, with no vaunted expectations of doing a ‘big trip’ beyond attending what looks like one of the coolest literary events of the calendar. But I have a feeling I might be going to fall in love with India after all, and perhaps you can expect upcoming blog posts about dahl and spiritual enlightenment from me too.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

In the midst of updating favorite book covers on my website, I stumbled across a great site called bookcoverarchive.com. Browsing through their collection of incredible covers made me wish repeatedly that I'd read (at least some of) these books. Every cover was a perfect balance of visual pleasure, narrative cleverness and just enough of an edge of sophistication. Basically - almost exactly what I'd want in a book.

Here are a few of my favorites



























And then my personal top pick - grabbing that spot for its cruel relevance and perfect irony...




The problem was, the more the magic of the covers worked on me and the more I longed to read these books, the more I worried about my judgement. Surely we all know not to judge a book by its cover?

Except that actually, it's the only way we do. Marketing books and visiting book stores on a daily basis has, for the first time, put me on the front line of how books get bought, and unfortunately it's not my fabulously written copy or my persuasive presence that sells a book - it's the work of the graphic designer in the studio who may or may not have even read it.

This seems a little crazy, and feel free to disagree, but I can't help feeling that in the age of Facebook profiles and digital cameras we can't really be surprised that the first and last lines of defense are appearances.

[all covers are the copyright of their respective publishers]

Real Vintage Words This Time

Today saw the acquisition of about 60 second-hand English books. My mother and I paid a visit to the ESRA (English Speaking Residents Association) bookshop to do battle with groaning shelves and frayed pages.

Our final selection saw Plato thrown together with John Le Carre, and Defoe's Moll Flanders getting intimate with Holly Golightly and Nabokov's Lolita - keeping good company one and all.



Other pairings were perhaps more appropriate, like a Penn University Press book on The Poetics of Imperialism and Conrad's Lord Jim, or an unencountered Proust novel with R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.






Still, all this heavy literary name-dropping aside, the best thing about this visit was the chance to get my hands on about 10 old Everyman editions of the classics. Some seemed quite random (I won't say completely random because who knows where the holes in my literary historical knowledge might lie), but the main point wasn't to read the books, but to own them.

In my post-kindle (or two) world, the relation between buying books and reading them has changed completely. On Kindle, I will buy on impulse, (it's only '1-Click' after all), virtually fork out the 4.99 GBP and promptly forget all about the book if I don't need to read it for work or for class. It exists on my e-reader and assumedly backed-up somewhere in Amazon's labyrinthine archives, but as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist in my possession at all - nothing more, really, than an item on my debit card bill.

But real books - on dead trees? Now there's something I'd like to own. Not read, necessarily, but just own. Looking ahead into the e-future of everything, I can't help but think (like most people) that reading an actual book may eventually disappear. But the physical book itself will not. Instead, e-book reading will bring about an increase in the value of a book, as they turn into possessions people want to own for the sake of having them.



Maybe this is awfully sad, the book divorced from its world-building, escapist capabilities, or it's function as a commentary on real life, but looking at my shelf of new, hard-backed, gilt-edged 'possessions', I find it hard to agree.