Friday, December 28, 2018
Bombay
My First Literary Festival as a Participant
Namaste from Bombay!
Today was another first for me! While I have attended two Literary Festivals in Bombay so far (The Times LitFest at the NCPA and the Times LitFest at Mehboob Studios), this was the first time I have been invited to participate in one. Naturally, I was quite excited.
My day began at Crazy 'o Clock (4.00 am)--which meant that I needed a nap mid-morning--but this has become the rather strange pattern of my days (or nights!). Still, I awoke, blogged, tweeted, read The Times of London online and then got my brekkie organized. I shall return to my workouts at the gym this coming Monday. Brekkie was muesli (minus an apple although I threw in two figs) with coffee while watching Doc Martin--to which I have returned with a vengeance as I find that there are now new episodes on Netflix.
However, I could not linger too long as I had to leave my studio to commute to the city for the Think Literature Festival By The Bay which is organized by a company called Think Literature. So, I googled the location of The Radio Club (where it was being held). I had been there before with my friend Nafisa who happens to be a member. But I had forgotten exactly where it was located. I also texted her to get directions. She, sweet supportive friend that she is, told me that she would be there too. My session was scheduled to begin at 12. 30--she said she would come by 12. 15 pm.
Accordingly, I showered, dressed, took the train and then a cab from Churchgate Station as the place happened to be at the very end of Apollo Bunder, past the Taj Hotel and close to the Strand Cinema. It is a part of the city that I would love to explore on foot--it seems really interesting.
I was there by 10.45 and my panel would only go on at 12.30 pm; but I wanted to get there to witness a few of the panel discussions before mine just so that I could get a sense of the format and the standard of the discussions. A talk on wild life in India was on when I arrived. I met the main organizer Saurabh Kumar (who had invited me to be a speaker at a panel on 'The Art of Reading') and the emcee, one Alaric (I did not get his last name) who introduced himself. I also met the Moderator on my panel--one Vikrant Utekar who told me that he was an editor with a publishing house and a published writer himself. I will need to look him up to find out what he had published.
I then sat through a panel discussion 'The Books That Shape Our World'. My main interest in it was that my former student whom I knew as Priti Thawani when she was an English major at Jai Hind College where I had taught from 1982-89 was one of the panelists. She is the author of Out With Lanterns, a novel about marital infidelity and so much more. Having changed her name after marriage, she is now known as Alisha Kripalani. We had caught up a couple of months ago, at a lunch organized by some other former students--so I would not be meeting her for the first time in decades, but I would be seeing her in her new avatar--as a published author discussing literary works--for the first time. This made me enormously proud and profoundly excited. What are the odds that a professor and her student would be speaking about Literature at the same literary festival!? She was just as struck by the coincidence of these facts as was I.
Her panel also presented the author Rajat Pillai and it was moderated by one Preeti Pathak. It was lovely to see how confidently Alisha carried herself through the discussion. I really do wish panel presenters would refrain from phrases such as "and stuff like that" (it was not Alisha). It is extremely immature and brings you down to the level of a nine-year old (they probably have more sophisticated ways to express themselves). Anyway...it gave me a sense of the kind of standard expected in the course of discussion.
A word about the 'festival': I was amazed at how small it was. In a large-ish hall, there were about fifty people (if that!). I've had more attendees at a conference! Anyway...I guess that since I am still learning the ropes when it comes to such gatherings, everything is a revelation to me. In the future, I will know how to handle invitations to such events. I will ask more questions about the audience.
All that said, the next panel piqued my interest; but one of the participants, a writer named Arjun Raj Gaind, who writes Indian detective novels, had the temerity to make a disparaging statement about no less a literary giant than Salman Rushdie. He airily dismissed Rushdie as follows: "...Salman Rushdie who has basically written the same novel nine times..." I was aghast. You are talking here about the author who won the Booker Prize and then, 25 years later, the Booker of Bookers Prize, who has repeatedly been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and whose work has resulted in an endless number of Masters and Doctoral dissertations and countless volumes of literary criticism. It takes a particular kind of courage (foolhardiness?) to make a statement like that at a public forum and while I respect his opinion (every reader is entitled to feel differently about what he/she reads), I did want to know how he could justify such an opinion. Oh and he also mispronounced his name calling him Rushdie instead of Roosh-die!
Needless to say, I asked him that question as soon as his panel had finished speaking. I must state that he was quick to admit that he suffers from Foot in Mouth disease! He then went on to say that after The Moor's Last Sigh, he does not believe that Rushdie has written anything of quality or significance. Fair enough! As I said, he is entitled to his opinion, but I still think that as a fledgling writer (in comparison to Rushdie), he ought not to diz a writer of such stature publicly. Win a couple of international awards, bro, and top The New York Times Best-seller List and then you can manifest that disease as much as you please. I would have loved to have carried on my conversation with him on this subject, but my panel was scheduled right after and I needed to get to the stage.
In the panel before mine, one of the participants (Anil Darker) did not show. A word of apology from the sponsors and the emcee would have been in order. But no, nothing. On my panel, two of the participants were no shows. Our panel was scheduled to begin at 12.30. By the time we were called on stage, it was already 1.00 pm. That was when one of the participants made her appearance--at 1.30 pm! Bad form, sister! To her credit, she did apologize...but then she went and ruined the impact by blaming (not herself for starting out late) but the traffic and the city! How long she has lived in the city is not clear to me. But I have lived here only three months and I know that traffic is a bane of this urban existence and I make sure that I give myself at least double the time I need to get some place--especially when it is an invited appearance at an event. What happened when Smriti Irani showed up late at the Times LitFest at Mehboob Studio will stick with me forever. Basically, you cut a sorry figure and no amount of sugarcoating your late appearance will help. Next time, be punctual. It is the first rule on the road to success!
I was quite at ease from the get-go when it came time to participate on our panel. I thought the issues brought up for discussion were pretty standard. What came home to me at the end of a few hours was that Indian writers go on and on like stuck records about how few readers there are. There are not! Readership world-wide has grown and were there no readers, there would not have been the proliferation of publishing houses in India. Readers now read differently--through e-books, on their Kindle, as I do through my public library on my iPad--but read they do.
These writers also lament disinterest on the part of publishers in new writers. Welcome to the club, darlings! This is a universal phenomenon and not exclusive to India. Show that you have writing chops and the world will fall at your feet. As in any profession, you have to prove your mettle before you can be lauded. It seems to me that young Indian writers dream of the success of an Arundhati Roy without realizing that long before The God Of Small Things made her a phenomenon, she had spent a couple of decades as a writer (a screen writer, an essayist, a freelance journalist, even writing grant applications for her creative projects). Plus, she, like Rushdie, is incredibly talented--let us not discount the role of talent in the achievement of success. Although it often seems as if success comes overnight to some people, that is never the case. Little is known about the blood, sweat and tears that go into arriving at that moment when public adulation becomes apparent--whether one is an actor, a writer, a musician or a poet. How many Nobel laureates have we even heard of before they achieve global fame by having this award bestowed on them?
There is also the oft-heard refrain here about publishers having a formula--you need to write to it if you want them to pick up your work. Again, same story all over the world. Publishing (whether academic or for the lay person) is a business and no publisher would dream of putting money on your work unless they thought they would be making money from it. So, if you do not wish to compromise your principles by playing to their gallery, you might want to self-publish or pay publishers to sell you an ISBN number. It's as simple as that.
When I could not hold in my impatience with their whingeing any further, I suggested that instead of airing their lamentations about readers, publishers, the state of the market and marketing personnel, etc., aspiring writers ought to just write the best book they can. I have no doubt that success would follow. I also suggested they look into taking Creative Writing courses and joining a Workshop group through which their drafts might be critiqued and improved before they become finished manuscripts and are hawked to publishers. From what I could gather, anyone who can wield a pen in India thinks it is okay to produce a manuscript and expect it to be snatched up by a publisher and adored by the audience. I did not hear very much about writing, revising, workshopping chapters or drafts. It seems to me that the speakers (if they were authors) did not seem to realize what a long and arduous journey it is from putting something down on paper to seeing it between covers.
I also heard one of the author-moderators lament the fact that Indian publishers do not organize book tours for their authors. Has she any idea, I wonder, how much Western authors loathe this tendency which publishers have now started to write into their contracts? Does she know how much writers like Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri resent the amount of time it takes away from their writing to go and hawk their wares at book tours? Indian writers ought to feel privileged that such conditions are not (yet) attached to their contracts and that they do not have to undertake the burdens of promoting their own work through book tours and signing appearances. I found the quality of the discussions overall to be rather juvenile--although I did learn a great deal about the workings of the publishing world in India from the views aired on stage.
Lunch was probably the best part of the event, if I am to be honest. I tried not to eat too much, but I ended up with salad, papad, naan, rice, dal, chicken bunna, mixed vegetable curry, mutton rogan josh and kulfi for dessert. I sat with Alisha and Nafisa (who had arrived as scheduled) and we had a chance to do some more discussion during lunch with another couple who were visiting from Dehra Dun. I was about to leave when the chief organizer (a name named Dilip) from the Think Foundation (Saurabh's father) asked if he could have a few minutes of my time. Nafisa was giving me a ride to Churchgate station and so I did not want to linger. But I obliged and listened to what he had to say--he wanted to know if, based on the views aired, there was a need for writing workshops that could hone the skills of young writers in India. He stated that he has a place in Khandala where such Writing Retreats might be held and he wondered if published authors like Alisha and myself might consider taking and giving such workshops respectively. I listened to him for about fifteen minuets and then excused myself and left as Nafisa was clearly getting antsy.
Back in her car, Nafisa and I enjoyed cruising down Colaba Causeway as she dropped me near Churchgate station. I nodded in the train on the way home and got back to bed for a long nap. My cold is making me feel drowsy most of the time as I am also dozing myself with Crocin to stop the runny nose.
At 5.00 pm, I had a pot of tea with cake and cheese sandwich biscuits and then went to my Dad's place. I reached rather late--so with just fifteen minutes with Russel, Dad and I left for Mass on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. As I am now having my meals at Dad's, I returned to his home and Russel joined us at the dining table for dinner. We had another smorgasbord of all sorts of items including momos and I had a piece of guava for dessert. Guavas have now gone off the market--I realize that the season for them is Fall and I really did enjoy them thoroughly for the past few months. I am now seeing pineapples all over the place.
Back home, I changed and went straight to sleep as I honestly felt quite groggy. But sleep eluded me and I stayed awake all the way until 1.30am. To pass time, I ate ice-cream after midnight and watched Doc Martin--still wracked by insomnia, I finally fell asleep close to 2.00 am.
Until tomorrow...
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