Inauguration Though we were tired, given our travel schedule a day prior to the fest, our spirits immediately escalated to a whole new level as we walked in to the Diggi Palace for the inaugural ceremony of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011. The bright and colorful décor of the palace and the vibrant atmosphere welcomed authors, celebrities, dignitaries and guests with warmth and love and soon the dropping temperature was almost inconspicuous. Noted Schola...
DAY 1 Thankfully I was scheduled to attend all the events held at the Mughal Tent. Given the fact that I was proudly flaunting and parading in my knee-length boots, the situation saved me the trouble of running from one venue to another. But towards the end of the day as the crowd multiplied four folds, I was lucky even to be able to attend the sessions. Kuch Sheher, Kuch Ped, Kuch Nazmon ka Khayaal (On Writing Poems) The first session of Mughal Tent ...
Day 2 If we thought Day 1 was crowded, Day 2 surprised us even more. It seemed like the crowd had multiplied over-night. The first session at Front Lawns was titled “Why Books Matter”, presented by the British Council. The dias had eminent authors including Patrick French, Sunil Sethi, Kiran Desai, John Makinson in conversation with Sonia Singh. Their discussion was intriguing and interactive. Talking about how and books matter, they touched up on t...
DAY 3 The day began on a very light and rejuvenating session that had Ruskin Bond in conversation with Ravi Singh. Aptly named Boys Will Be Boys, the session saw Ruskin Bond read a few excerpts from his various books and a poem he had recently penned for kids. Ruskin Bond is truly one of the finest story-tellers of all times. He proved it yet again as he made up a story, almost instantly, of how escaped a tiger attack when he was 12. And boy! What a ...
DAY 4 Mumbai Narrative saw Gyan Prakash and Sonia Faleiro, in conversation with Madhu Trehan, discuss their books set in the urban cities. Gyan Praskash’s Mumbai Fables and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing set in the backdrop of Mumbai reveal different aspects and facets of an urban city in a fascinating way. ...
DAY 5 The first session on the last day of the fest that I attended was Duet that comprised readings by Kavery Nambisan and Sarita Mandanna. The duo was introduced by Namita Devidayal. Kavery and Sarita spoke about their evolving styles and subjects during the course of their readings. I managed to attend a part of Translating the Classics, at the Durbar Hall, wherein Arunava ...
Everyone has had their share of news to report, their accounts, and their observations and quickly arrived upon conclusions about the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011, so far called the biggest literary extravaganza happening this side of the hemisphere, and being compared to cult festivals like Woodstock. Given it’s been a good 5 days since the fest ended; I thought it’s time I put down my two cents worth of experience. Once the festival kicked off...
The Jaipur Literature Festival 2011 was more than just a festival for me. It was a celebration of ingenious minds. And it gave me an opportunity to know many wondrous authors and writers of the country. Amongst them all, I prominently grew a certain fondness for Sonia Faleiro. And it’s not because we share the same name. It was the kind of substance she brought with her - her second book (and her first non-fiction offering) “Beautiful Thing: Inside th...
Having attended the book launch of Salil Desai's debut novel, The Body in the Back Seat in Pune recently, we were intrigued by his work and impressed with his background of film-making and having contirbuted to many anthologies. We got talking to the author and here's the unabridged version. You have been a filmmaker for a long time now. Why did you move to writing a mystery novel? Wouldn't a film have been a more effective medium of bringing your...
You-Know-Who is instrumental in changing the entire setting of the young-adult (YA) fiction world and upping the stakes, don’t you? Hagrid and his Baby Dragon, Hedwig, the chocolate frog, moving beans, Dumbledore, the muggles and the entire Hogwarts have transformed the YA literature genre and breathed in new life. Harry, Ron and Hermione have made Rowling’s dream come true and, along with that, the YA fiction world has reached new heights. ...
Amongst the very many habits, the one that I would certainly like my daughter to inherit is the habit of reading. Seeing her seated in her own private corner devouring good books, being able to use the most fitting words, discovering the importance of pronouncing words rightly and making use of the right punctuations and pauses as and when necessary, would make me a happy mother . But for kids to inculcate such a skill set, it is important for parents to step in and br...
Swati Kaushal is one author we loved chatting up with. An email interview with her and we know she is one independent woman who loves people who stand by their mistakes, very much like the protagonists of her novels in Piece of Cake and A Girl Like Me. During the chat, Swati revealed what makes her novels a delightful read and how she goes about shaping the characters of her novels. And all you aspiring writers, don’t get disheartened, she has some very interesting...
Tartan Noir’s Origin
The Tartan Noir genre can be traced to Scotland and Scottish authors: right from James Hogg’s book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and RL Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). While Hogg’s novel is an eccentric blend of the gothic, crime, horror, and psychology, Stevenson wrote about a split personality with a major twist-in-the-tale and metamorphosi...
ASTON: More or less exactly what you...
DAVIES: That's it ... that's what I'm getting at is ... I mean, what sort of jobs ... (Pause.)
ASTON: Well, there's things like the stairs ... and the ... the bells...
DAVIES: But it'd be a matter ... wouldn't it ... it'd be a matter of a broom ... isn't it?
- Dialogue between Aston and Davies in The Caretaker, a talked-about Harold Pinter play.
The Theatre of the Absurd belongs to a genre of absurdist fiction, writ...
Not many authors choose to write for a cause. While most fiction writers are happy talking about relationships and other humdrum stuff, Saptarshi Basu, is a new author who is writing to make a difference.
Through his writings Basu is determined to make things better for people around. His latest book titled Autumn In My Heart, touches upon the sensitive issue of student suicide.
Bookchums chats up with the author of Love, Logic And The God's A...
Good children’s books have wooed many adults. The story, well-etched characters, marvelous imagination have compelled many individuals to stack their classics and chick-lit right at the bottom and pick up the rich collection by revered authors like Anant Pai, RK Narayan, JK Rowling, Christopher Paolini and Ruskin Bond.
Interestingly Dr Louise Joy, a Cambridge University academic, had reasoned that traditional children's tales are popular among older readers ...
Magic Realism as the phrase suggests is not just about mere magic or dreamlike suggestions, content, or fine arts. It delves beyond the arena of fantasy. It observes and describes the banality of human existence via magical lenses. It has been portrayed time and again in literature and paintings and several contemporary writers such as Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie write along the lines of magic realism. The beauty of it lies in fi...
Speaking of macabre literature, the first person who comes to mind is Roald Dahl. After a reading of Skin, one realizes why his macabre writings are immensely popular. Drioli, a man with a prized tattoo on his back disappears after the promise of a fine life by the dubious owner of the Bristol Hotel in Cannes. And what the reader discovers later is that there is no Bristol Hotel. All that chillingly emerges after his disappearance is a varnished painting, a dead-ringer v...
All it really takes to hook a person to a good book, is the opening line.
Though they are stand alone sentences, they lure and entice (sometimes quite literally) the readers to discover more.
I recently happened to glance at the opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story and it read,
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be ...
Acceptance is something we all desire. To be appreciated and loved obviously comes after that. Queer writers R Raj Rao and Hoshang Merchant reflected upon how this very basic desire (that is often taken for granted by others) is something that does not come easy to queer writers. All this and much more was discussed at one of the sessions called Whistling In the Dark at the recently concluded Jaipur Literary Festival 2012.
Hoshang Merchant threw light on the dile...
The threat of a ban, the artist’s dissent, self-expression, it was all there, in between the uttered words, at the inaugural session of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2012. The session was aptly called, Bhakti Poetry: The Living Legacy.
After an introduction and welcome by Festival Producer Sanjoy Roy; poet, literary critic, academician and activist Purushottam Agarwal spoke on bhakti poetry over the ages. He talked about the element of G...
How well can you translate Gulzar’s works into English? Pavan K.Varma has walked the tight rope and gone on to do so. As a result, in a brand new bilingual poetry collection, we have Gulzar’s Hindi originals on the left side of the page, to Varma’s English translations of the same, on the right.
The story behind the book title goes like this: One day, after a long gap, Gulzar abruptly called up Varma and told him, “As several of...
Ever since there have been humans on earth, or more precisely, the male and female species, there has been the omnipresent fatal attraction that goes around by the name of love. It is thus no wonder that writers from time immemorial have featured love in their stories. One of the few early examples includes Indian poet Kalidasa and his poems Sakoontala and Meghdootam. The latter is the tale of an estranged couple, and a cloud who acts as a messenger to the husb...
On May 24, 2011, the multifaceted, enigmatic, 'the man of the thin-growl voice', the mesmerizing word-creator, the protest-singer, folk-singer, the harmonica-round-the-neck man - Bob Dylan, turned 70. If compared to a very commercial Hindi film song sequence, Dylan wears and discards many of his superhero to ordinary man costumes in the space of one song at a time.
Now, we may not call him a free-flowing great singer like Lata Mangeshkar, but the cul...
It has been a while now, but we still do remember Oliver Twist walking up, trembling to the cook of the workhouse and asking for a little more. Food has featured in various books of literature, sometimes as key characters. How would have, say, Robinson Crusoe survived without scouring for food on the island he ends up in after a shipwreck.
For all those with the love for chocolate, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a tre...
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