Tech metropolis is coded for litfests – no litpests
Kasauli’s Khushwant Singh Literature Festival in Oct, Mumbai’s LitLive in Nov, Bangalore’s BLF final weekend. It was heartening to see up shut and private the true and current stranger-than-fiction improve in footfalls and variety with every successive occasion. Also heart-wrenching that our personal much-cloned, more-craved Mumbai TOI litfest stopped sparking Mehboob Studio’s historic sprawl in 2017. At one time, each city/urbane wannabe jumped on the bookwagon; Covid and kanjoos sponsorship prompted the anticipated shake-out. Darwin’s survival concept labored.
Haute liteur authors have turn into rock stars. Take Dalrymple; PowerPoint displays of William the Audience Conqueror are as riveting as his prodigiously researched books. Shashi Tharoor is just like the ringmaster whipping phrases to his bidding. His protégé Manu Pillai is Shahzada of Storytelling. Devdutt Pattanaik is mythologist-mixologist Jerry Pinto leaps throughout the stage – and generally off it – in his impassioned championing of language/s. And what can I not say of Amitav Ghosh?
Firebrand politicians don’t even must have written a e book to be mobbed at litfests.
Next is a shifting solid of those that have a brand new e book out and debut novelists who’ve turned Scroogey critics into the Soros of superlatives. Plus these whose opus has skimmed off a creamy layer prize. At BLF, it was the notoriously taciturn Upamanyu Chatterjee, whom I managed to attract into good-humoured duel. He drew first blood by telling a delighted viewers that I hadn’t learn the JCB prize winner (the place grass-smoking, jerking-off, urban-exile Agastya Sen has, 36 years and eight books later, became Lorenzo Senesi, a reflective Benedictine monk in existential search). It turned win-win for him as a result of in proving that I had, he acquired me to marvel at his detailed descriptions and quote samples of his droll wit: Luca ‘drove with the insouciance of a local cat with several lives to throw away’. Or his intelligent referencing of ‘America’s darling’ actress in landlady Mary and her cat Pickford.
In book-signing queues, our prose execs may be out-snaked by these with different fame-claims: display and sports activities stars, gurus of physique/thoughts/soul/work-life steadiness, local weather change and now Demon/Deity AI. Celebrity’s latest paratroopers are ‘influencers’. Not to be sneezed at. Last Saturday, Prajakta Koli’s arrival set off hysterical whoops to rival a Coldplay live performance.
Young Adult Literature is passe. We had a Children’s part nearly from our 2011 begin. BLF’s youngest tier was Age 4+. So whom will publishers goal after GenZ? GenD for diaper?
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Alec Smart mentioned: “Zakir Hussain is now Allah Rakha.”
Disclaimer
This article is meant to carry a smile to your face. Any connection to occasions and characters in actual life is coincidental.
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