Jaipur Literature Festival: Social media is a disease

Few people know that Paresh Barua, the chief of the separatist group ULFA, is also a poet. But apparently, once, when a poet had published a verse missive in an Assamese literary journal asking what Baruah thought freedom was, he chose to reply in verse that he too was a poet dreaming of freedom but since it wasn’t time yet to give up the gun, he’d chosen it over the pen.

Anuradha Sharma Pujari, editor of Sadin and Satsori, the journal where this interaction took place, recounted this interesting episode during the session on ‘Cross Media Narratives: Creativity, Connectivity and Communication’ on the last day of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival.

Besides Pujari, the session had two other participants — Kaajal Oza Vaidya, a Gujarati columnist, novelist and screenplay writer, and CP Surendran, dna editor-in-chief, who is also a poet and novelist.

Given that the panelists write in different formats for very different audiences, the discussion veered around the writer’s identity and the nature of writing itself. “I write because that is the only thing I know,” said Vaidya.

Surendran said, “Writing, in all its forms, is a highly neurotic activity. There is an undercurrent of anger and marginalisation that find expression in writing.”

The debate then shifted to social media and its role in contemporary life, with Surendran making the point that Twitter had become a platform for self-promotion. “Social media is not so much technology as it is a disease.”