Tag Archive for ‘Vikram Seth’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Vikram Seth'

Back with a bang: Jaipur Lit Fest

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on January 18, 2010

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Posted by Namita Bhandare

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, the DS Jaipur Literature Fesival is back with Season V (Jan 21-25), with more international writers, more Indian writers and certainly a bigger anticipated audience than previous years.

Writers who’ve confirmed attendance include Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle and Amit Chaudhuri, widely regarded as India’s best-known writer of his generation.

To pretend that there is a hierarchy or even a social pecking order at the fest would be misleading. There are no tickets; entry is free to all. Everybody queues up for lunch and dinner — everybody including Salman (Rushdie), Pico (Iyer) and Vikram (Seth). Writers and readers lounge in the winter sun, signing books, drinking coffee and gossiping (oh, the gossip).

The Lit Fest is the baby of writers William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale. Writing for The Guardian recently, Dalrymple said: “Wherever I appeared at literary festivals around the globe, all the usual celebrated Indian writers were there – everywhere, that is, except India.”

And so, began India’s quest for a fest. Starting with 17 writers over three days, the fest will this year include 160 writers and performers. [See the complete programme and list of writers attending here.]

This year’s festival is set once again in the charming, heritage Diggi Palace, the haveli of the Thakurs of Diggi, a small princely state. The Durbar Hall with its Venetian mirrors and framed portraits of venerated gods and ancestors seats about 300. Over the years, however, as the number of writers descending on Jaipur has gone up, Diggi Palace has sprouted new venues. There’s the Mughal Tent (which seats about 100 people), Baithak (about 75) and the front lawn (can easily take upwards of 1,000).

It was at the front lawn, last year where Vikas Swarup received news that Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film based on his book Q&A had received 11 Oscar nominations. The crowd erupted in a roar as Swarup made his hasty departure for the film’s Mumbai premiere. Jai Ho.

Every fest has its own little gem, its highlights: Salman Rushdie ticking off ‘hostile’ journalists for what he saw as unfriendly reports in the press. Vikram Seth getting ticked off by a local newspaper for sipping a glass of wine while speaking to his moderator Sonia Faleiro.

This year’s showstopper could well be a controversial, woman writer and thinker. Her name is not up on the official programme yet, because she is yet to get a visa. But, do watch this space. If she comes, fireworks.

Previously on AW

The greatest literary show on earth

Slumdog glory

Rough Guide to the Fest

Golden age of Indian writing

Published

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on July 17, 2009

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Writers are finding inspiration in the furiously evolving societies and encouragement in a buoyant book market, writes Andrew Buncombe in The Independent

: Colin Thubron, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple and Pico Iyer at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2009

There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to a Delhi bookshop to browse its section of Indian literature would be a somewhat depressing experience. There would a handful of stellar stand-out names, of course; Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and one or two others. But the collection would be a half-hearted affair, seemingly there more out of duty than joy, and usually it would be hidden away at the back of the shop. ”Now, that has all completely changed,” laughs V K Karthika, publisher and chief editor of HarperCollins India. “Now those books are at the front of the shop. What’s more, they’re actually the books you want to read, rather than the books you read because you feel you should.” more

The Vikram Seth interview

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on July 11, 2009

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In Outlook, Sheela Reddy speaks to Vikram Seth on A Suitable Girl, his sequel to A Suitable Boy, big, fat advances and matrimonial websites

You are the first Indian writer to have got, and continue to get, a big advance, in a way professionalising writing, making it possible to earn a living from it without resorting to a day job?

I never thought that would happen.

If you look at my first two novels — The Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy — no one would have thought they would get a decent advance — and, of course, The Golden Gate didn’t. That (money) was never my initial motivation. But I am very grateful that it actually gives me the time to concentrate on writing and other things that interest me, rather than being tied to some kind of job. Or worse, a job involving words which I think depletes one of a particular kind of energy. more

In search of India

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on April 20, 2009

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This year’s London book fair celebrates the diversity of contemporary Indian writing. How much do the novelists of the new generation have in common, asks Amit Chaudhuri. In the Guardian:

The theme of the London book fair this year is Indian writing. Vikram Seth, Amartya Sen, William Dalrymple and other writers in frequent circulation in this country are going to be joined by writers – K Satchidanandan, Javed Akhtar – distinguished or popular on their own terrain but less known here, for five days of discussions and celebrations. Something like this happened in 2006 to the Frankfurt book fair, when planeloads of Indian novelists and poets descended on the Intercontinental Hotel, waved to each other over breakfast, and then read from their work to courteous audiences in the afternoons and evenings.

The theme then, too, was India; and the “idea of India” acted as a catalyst to a process that might have already begun, but received, at that moment, a recognisable impetus – the confluence, in one place, of literary and intellectual dialogue with what is basically business activity, each bringing magic and movement to the other. The India-themed Paris book fair followed swiftly.

The greatest literary show on earth

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on January 28, 2009

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The annual Jaipur Literature Festival might have met with lukewarm coverage by the Indian press, but the world press goes ga-ga. Amulya Gopalakrishnan writes for Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, calling it with considerable hyperbold the ‘greatest literary show’ on earth. Brown was also one of the speakers at Jaipur.

Every January, the ancient city of Jaipur, India, celebrates the written word in a literary festival co-founded by Indian writer Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, the British travel writer and historian, that easily places first in Asia for cultural cachet and star power. It’s hard to believe that the festival is only three years old, given the crackle and buzz around its events and personalities—Salman Rushdie chose the occasion for his first public appearance after the fatwa. And this year too, through five sun-drenched mornings and vivid, musical evenings in the dignified old Diggi Palace, the festival made headlines across India.

And Jeremy Kahn in the International Herald Tribune says the fest has grown from a small, regional affair to one of international stature

In India’s headlong rush into modernity, Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is hardly on the cutting edge. A fixture on the tourist circuit, it is best known for its pink-walled old city, its 18th-century Maharashtra’s forts and havelis, its classic jewelry and its traditional, technicolor patchwork textiles. But for a few days each January, this city lays claim to a place at the heart of the contemporary literary world.

Bachchan, Slumdog & more: a rough guide to the Jaipur Lit Fest

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on January 15, 2009

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Posted by Namita Bhandare:

I know the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival (Diggi Palace hotel, Jaipur, January 21-25, entry free to all) love to say that the festival is democratic and that they don’t want to pitch one session over and above the others but here’s what I think will be the star events at the Lit Fest:

1. The Indian premiere of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. That the film has reaped awards at the Golden Globe and is tipped to be an Oscar favourite has only added to the curiosity factor. And now that Amitabh Bachchan has blasted the film for daring to show the ‘murky under belly’ of Mumbai (has he taken over from where Raj Thackeray left off?), the pre-publicity hype has just got a notch hotter. As they say in showbiz, any publicity is good publicity. Anyway, to come back to the film: present at the premiere will be, no not Danny Boyle (he’ll be in Mumbai) but Vikas Swarup who wrote Q&A, the book on which the script is based, and also, apparently, Anil Kapoor. I’m a bit alarmed by the filmi flourishes which the festival’s PR guides seem to favour (they roped Aamir Khan in last year), but I guess they’re doing it because they believe it sells the festival. If you ask me, the festival (now in its fourth year) doesn’t need much selling. Continue reading ‘Bachchan, Slumdog & more: a rough guide to the Jaipur Lit Fest’

India’s writers tell Aids stories

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on August 17, 2008

in Books and Health

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Some of India’s best-known writers have come together in a unique anthology — Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India — of writing which tells the human stories behind HIV/Aids in the country. From BBC:

Salman Rushdie with one of his subjects (Photo: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)

They include Booker Prize-winners Sir Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai; Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy; and internationally-acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple. Other contributors include novelist Amit Chaudhuri, leading Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, historian-writer Mukul Kesavan and popular novelist Shobhaa De.

[...] Sir Salman, for example, spends a day with eunuchs in the western city of Mumbai (Bombay) to write up a piece called The Half-Woman God.

“India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s. Yet… the third gender of India still need our understanding, and our help,” he says.

Kiran Desai travelled to the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh to meet its sex workers. The state has one of the highest rates of infection in India.

“What I had seen, really seen, were lives lived with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled,” Desai writes.

“The emotions of love and friendship, you’d assume would be missing or rotten, in these communities – existing even more so for their being sought amidst illegality, fragmentation and betrayal.

HIV/AIDS and the ethics of responsibility in India

An extract from Amartya Sen’s foreword to “Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” From The Telegraph:

The ethics of responsibility has been a big subject in analysing the social aspects of AIDS. The point has been made, with considerable influence, that since HIV infection is primarily contracted through voluntary acts, such as unsafe sex, it is the individual rather than the society that should take responsibility for avoiding the disease and accepting the consequences of irresponsible actions. This way of seeing the social ethics of AIDS would have vast implications for what an afflicted person can or cannot expect the state to do for the ill…..

The idea that somehow the afflicted person bears the responsibility for his or her own unfortunate condition, since the infection could have been avoided through changing personal behaviour, is indeed quite prevalent – not just in advanced countries like the United States of America, but also in India. There is certainly an element of narrow plausibility in this general outlook. Many of the actions that may lead to the infection are certainly within the person’s own control, and the role of personal responsibility is indeed an important connection to bear in mind in planning strategies for prevention, through greater availability and use of information and more social education and advocacy. And yet to see this as an ‘open and shut’ case of just personal responsibility also misses the nine-tenth of the iceberg that lies below the water, hidden from view.

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