A packed hall sat silent listening to the Jaipur poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam as he read his ghazals, naazms and shayari in chaste Urdu.
JAIPUR: A packed hall sat silent listening to the Jaipur poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam as he read his ghazals, naazms and shayari in chaste Urdu.
And it was only when he had done that it became clear, as the audience refused to empty the hall that they were all there actually to hold their seat for the next speaker.
It was Salman Rushdie all the way today, from the press conference where he fielded questions with the expertise of a swordsman weilding his weapon, to the actual workshop, where he fenced with Barkha Dutt, and went on to wave the red flag in Rajasthan by reading out the rather nasty pen portrait of the Rajput Colonel who inhabits his book, Shalimar the Clown.
More Salmanism: My life is not shaped by the public; much of my time is spent with friends and family. So I do not let what is said about me bother me too much.
He will not write my autobiography because, "I write books about other people". I had to be sure I would not be inspired to write revenge fiction after the fatwa, I did not want to be this creature and continue to write the way I had been writing…"
A world removed from the directness of Rushdie was the introspective wisdom shared by Amit
Chaudhuri who defended his type of "odd fish" writing by pointing out that except in England, and in English, the rest of the literary world believed that the fragment, the short story, the introspective thought was important. Today, we are told a book is a masterpiece before it is out in the market; while masterpiece and classic were words used to describe something that had stood the test of time and was the result of much thought…As Professor of Contemporary Literature, he was tackling the new approaches to literary and other writing.
Anita Roy, who chaired the session, drew out the many facets of Chaudhuri as a writer: the critic, the poet, essayist and novelist.
A Publisher's panel that included Ravi Singh of Penguin, David Godwin and Marc Parent as well as Urvashi Butalia discussed the present and future of publishing.
And on the by now icy lawns the wine-warmed launch of Caferati was scheduled to follow.
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