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Absent authors provide the best moments on Day 1

The reading of Karnad’s play, Tughlaq, is in full flow under lights in the open lawns of Diggi Palace, air-conditioned for free by the Jaipur weather.

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“Stop it!” screamed Om Puri, and the mike screamed with him. As I type this, Om Puri and Girish Karnad are shouting at each other in front of a few hundred people, many of whom have weathered fog and full body scanners to come and listen to them.

The reading of Karnad’s play, Tughlaq, is in full flow under lights in the open lawns of Diggi Palace, air-conditioned for free by the Jaipur weather.

This is the final event of the first day of the Jaipur Literature festival, an actor and a playwright applying the ‘finish’ on a day that wasn’t quite all there, by the festival’s own standards. Some key authors couldn’t make it, while some others were rendered invisible by the fog.

In a sense, it is rather fitting that the best moments on Day I of the Jaipur Literature Festival were provided by authors who weren’t there.

Playwright Girish Karnad, who was supposed to deliver the keynote address in the morning failed to turn up. At the last minute, poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was roped in to do the honours.

The ‘address’ quickly turned into a history of Indian poetry-cum-recitation session that not many were prepared for. It was finally left to a poetic soul from Mumbai, that goes by the name of Arun Kolatkar, to grab the attention of an audience that was beginning to wonder (some audibly) who is this bearded old man and what, or who, is ‘Prakrit’.

Kolatkar’s famous God poem, “Darling God, Will you be a good God and kill my mother-in-law?” was the first truly festival moment.

You could almost hear the gears click into place as the audience, many attending for the first time, warmed up to Mehrotra’s rendition of Kolatkar begging God to kill, one after another, his father-in-law, his sister-in-law, and all other in-laws so he can finally be at peace with his Jani.

If the inauguration was enlivened by Kolatkar, the highlight of the evening, for those who resisted the temptation of Alexander McCall Smith in a neighbouring venue, was Mahasweta Devi’s passionate plea that the ‘right to dream’ is the first fundamental right. Devi wasn’t a speaker at the festival. 

The man who had made a film on her called Talking Writing, Naveen Kishore, wasn’t there either. But his film, based on four conversations with the legendary Bengali author, was screened, and it was quite surreal to hear her talk about how she finds herself unable to communicate with people who admire her.

“Young people come all the time, and they are full of admiration...I just tell them to leave me alone,” she says. Strange thought this, wafting through a festival where writers come to be admired, and fans come to admire.

One of my fantasies is to attend a session where you have on stage a panel of four authors/critics who do not admire each other and have the guts to say so to each other in public. And if a conversation between them can begin after that, it would be something. But then, Gore Vidal wouldn’t come to Jaipur, and Norman Mailer cannot come.

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