Record crowds at Zee Jaipur Literature Festival this year

The eighth edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (ZeeJLF) ended in the Pink City on Sunday evening. This year was bigger, better, and more crowded with people who came from near and far to be a part of this unique mela of celebration, writing and knowledge.

This year, an estimated 245,000 people visited ZeeJLF, a significant jump over the 220,000 footfalls notched last year. On Saturday alone, a record 55,000 walked into the 200 year old Diggi Palace venue whose 14 acres seemed, as Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje said in her inauguration speech, to expand to accommodate everyone.

ZeeJLF was controversy-free this time, except for a few remarks by Shashi Tharoor, but the closing debate on the subject, "Culture is the New Politics", did generate some heat. Suhel Seth, who's known to be forthright, demanded that prime minister Narendra Modi should apologise to the public for the extreme statements made by some of his party members in recent weeks.

Seth said fringe elements of the Sangh Parivar had been injected into mainstream politics and were trying to tamper with the country's multi-cultural ethos. Seth said one way in which they were doing this was to rewrite history to suit their political objectives, adding that he was worried about its effect on children. There was also a war of words between him and Shazia Ilmi, BJP's recent inductee. When Ilmi quoted Amartya Sen in the panel discussion, Seth said that she should stop quoting the pro-welfare economist since she was now with the BJP. Ilmi said that she did not require his permission to quote whomever she wanted to. Ilmi said it was unfair that, as a Muslim, her joining the BJP and not Congress, Samajwadi Party or MIM had caused an outrage. For her, issues were not restricted to religion, she said.

The stars of the festival undoubtedly was Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul, who spoke to Farrukh Dhondy on his life and books on day 3. Others who got the crowd roaring in appreciation were former president APJ Abdul Kalam, Naseeruddin Shah, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Waheeda Rehman, and Sonam Kapoor, who was here on Sunday to launch a book.

Amish Tripathi's announced at this year's ZeeJLF that his next books, after the humungous success of the Shiva Trilogy, would be based on Lord Ram, while Jhumpa Lahiri won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Geostrategic conflicts and concerns were a major subject for discussions at ZeeJLF. As many as nine sessions which looked at the Middle East cauldron, the Indo-Pak equation, Sri-Lanka, China and what the changing economic equations mean for the Western powers like the US and UK.

Journalist-writer Scott Anderson who' written a book on Lawrence in Arabia later told dna, "What is happening with the ISIS is really the final dismantling of the artificial borders created by Western powers between Iraq, Syria, Jordan and other countries. After century of disastrous interventions there finally seems to be a realisation that the Ottoman Empire was on to something, given the way it held all these regions together."

Veteran observer-reporter Ahmed Rashid who has written five books on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, Rashid pointed out with chilling accuracy how the real threat to Pakistan came from itself. Pakistan's former Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, author Anatol Lieven, G Parthasarthy and journalist Suhasini Haider joined in this debate where everything from the recent Peshawar massacre to 26/11 was discussed.

Poetry was the dominant theme celebrated at the ZeeJLF this year, with the keynote address delivered by three eminent poets –Vijay Seshadri, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Ashok Vajpeyi. A multi-national line-up of poets addressed the daily poetry reading sessions, which included Ruth Padel from the UK, and American sensation Kevin Powers. There were also poets from a later generation, including CP Surendran (also dna's editor), Jeet Thayil and Arundhati Subramaniam. The Rs 2 lakh first Khushwant Singh Memorial Award for poetry was also given out at this year's ZeeJLF to Subramaniam. The sessions were invariably well-attended, prompting poet after poet to say that poetry was seeing very good days indeed.