Travel & visa woes forgotten as literary stars dazzle at Jaipur

JAIPUR: Fog in Delhi stranded many authors and the visa authorities allegedly played havoc with the schedule, but in Jaipur the sun shone
benevolently as the Jaipur Literature Festival, touted as the ‘‘greatest literary fair on this planet’’ by celebrity editor Tina Brown, kicked off to a flamboyant start on Thursday with the glitterati from Mumbai, New Delhi and London in attendance.
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s morning session, however, was called off because the author couldn’t make it on time — his flight from Delhi was cancelled. Girish Karnad’s flight was also delayed and his keynote address had to be rescheduled. Henry Louis Gates Jr, author of ‘‘Thirteen ways of looking at a black man’’, and Andrew Lycett, biographer of books on Dylan Thomas and Rudyard Kipling, could not get visa clearances and had to cancel their visits. Shabana Azmi barely made it on time for the evening session on Thursday where she read from her mother Shaukat Kaifi’s memoirs, ‘‘Kaifi aur main’’.
Yet the festival had abundant energy with writers, authors and publishers mingling with the audience, students and delegates alike. One of the most stimulating sessions of the day was held in the Mughal Tent (now called the ‘Merrill Lynch Mughal Tent’ — sponsors are taking note of the festival’s growing prominence, just as the festival itself is called ‘DSC Jaipur Literature Festival’).
Italian intellectual and publisher Roberto Calasso provided some fantastic insights into how mythology and ritual are violent and innate human impulses with which mankind has always had a problematic relationship. His theory that the internet revolution as a form of mankind’s desire to connect with ‘‘manas’’ (the sense-mind in the yogic world) found its share of sceptics, but it did uplift the audience to loftier realms of thought.