The last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival began on a fitting note with British writer Andrew O’Hagan delivering an eloquent lecture on ‘the power of literature’.
Speaking about how it is only literature that enables us to truly be alive in our everyday life, he said, “It is not the unexamined life, but the unimagined life that is not worth living.” And writing is “this business of making marks on the page that has the power to make the world a grander place for the people living in it.”
O’Hagan traced all the destructive elements of modern life — from wars to terrorism to wastage of food in supermarkets — to one cause: a failure of the imagination. “If a person could actually imagine the life of the secretary on the 102nd floor happily planning her wedding the following week and her new life with her husband, he wouldn’t be able to drive an aeroplane into that building. If a politician could imagine the laughter of a little girl playing in an Afghan village, he wouldn’t send out drones to bomb those villages.”
So how does one keep this faculty of imagination alive, and nurture it? “It’s easy,” said O’Hagan. “You read literature. Literature is the news that stays news.”
On Day 5 too, much of the laughter was provided by the session featuring the inimitable Hanif Kureishi. After he had spoken about the threads of hedonism and sexuality that run through his works, a spectator asked him, “As a Muslim, do you consider yourself an aberration?”
Hanif’s response, “That’s a great question.” And there was a ripple of laughter as he pondered aloud, “Am I an aberration?” He went on to add, “All my life I have fought against authoritarian systems, and any religion is an authoritarian system. I don’t think of myself as a Muslim.”
If that was a great question, a greater question followed. An old gentleman in a suit and tie stood up from the back and said, “Mr Kureishi, my grandson was circumcised. It was very painful for him. Did you feel the pain too?” The guffaws from the audience had hardly died down when Kureishi replied, “It’s been a long time since anyone took an interest in my genitals.”
Kureishi also exploded the entire myth of the writer’s block when a woman asked him how he dealt with it. “I’ve never had writer’s block ever since I’ve had kids. Writing is what I do to pay my bills, so I cannot sit around pretending to be an artist. I have to keep writing so that I can buy playstations for my son and alcohol for my older kids.”And he added for good measure, “I think of myself as a practical man, as a professional writer. In fact, I don’t give a f**k for reviews. For me, the highest form of criticism is a nice cheque.”
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