“Aap kehte nahi hai, isliye mujhe aapke liye kehna padta hai.”
Gulzar, Jaipur Literature Festival, 2017. To an enthralled audience, explaining why he reads poetry and why they are about the things they are. This, before he drops lines of poetry that are rich with an unusual mix of old-world charm and hot-off-the-press contemporariness. Sample this, for instance: A poem he reads about a guy who has a tattoo of a cow on his arm ends with – “it was the picture of the cow that, in the end, saved him from the riots….”
Chilling, real, and no-holds-barred.
That is much of what literature does, and the writers of that literature fight to prove, day in, day out. Particularly at a festival that celebrates it.
Words were what dominated Days 1 and 2 of the Jaipur Literature Festival. They dropped like so many honeyed slices of encouragement from Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje; they found exultation in co-founders William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale and Sanjoy Roy; and they found their way to interviews in the form of delightful anecdotes.
Like renowned British journalist and author Mark Tully, who, in the midst of a chat, spoke at length about his Calcutta origins. “My house there still existed till about 10 years ago, you know. I went back to finally get my hands on my birth certificate – and I looked at that register from 1935. It turned out the second birth registered after mine was my sister’s – 18 months later. Which means that no one had bothered to get their kids’ births registered at that time for a full 18 months!”
Or, when I proceeded to attach a microphone to his collar, when he burst out in anecdote:
“You know what this reminds me of? An interview with Rajiv Gandhi. I’d been ‘micing’ him at the time, and he’d gotten it wrong, so I’d said: ‘thoda neeche karo’. Rajiv was impressed and told me I spoke really good Hindi. ‘I wish I spoke better Hindi!’ I told him – and Rajiv was quick to respond with, ‘So do I Mark, so do I.”
Words were what gave vent to the simmering anger of 2016 – a year that saw the intelligentsia’s collective consciousness rise against a US Presidential election, an Indian currency exercise, a British exit. “Brexit was idiotic!” said William Dalrymple in the course of my interview, while also slamming Trump for being a “moron”. Poet Anne Waldman performed beautifully and evocatively on stage as she remembered, like she said, “my sisters who will participate in the March on Washington a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration”.
In these uncertain times, literature is the only thing that holds us together, reiterated co-founders of the festival, Namita Gokhale and Sanjoy Roy. And literature shone, in the throngs of people that descended upon the grounds in a matter of a few hours.
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