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Journalism of Courage
On a day unusually warm for winter, many sat in rapt attention in an ornately painted palace hall listening to Professor James Shapiro discuss the relevance of British bard William Shakespeare in a modern world. The setting couldn’t have been more apt.
An hour later — in a much larger open field under a giant canopy — hundreds trooped in, sitting, standing and many delicately balancing on one leg just to hear lyricist-poet Javed Akhtar belt out his most popular Urdu couplets. A few yards away, people — mostly youngsters — stepped out of a big, white tent with cotton bags filled with books and smiles on their faces.
Similar scenes played out one after another, every hour, on the second-last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival at the beautiful and aesthetically wonderful Diggi Palace. If every literature festival happening in each corner of the country were to be like this, wouldn’t it be just perfect, I wondered. No wonder, over the years, JLF has come to be identified as the crossroads for creative thinking, exchange of ideas and a melting pot of the finest of Indian and international literature.
Sipping little kullads of adrak-wali chai, youngsters, men and women alike, thronged the palace grounds discussing Steve McCurry, Aleksandar Hemon and Christophe Jaffrelot and then later running after them to get their books signed. Sure enough, there were a lot of selfies, groupies and vlogging doing the rounds, but then did you possibly think you could remove social media from youngsters?
The vibe and visuals at the time-worn palace grounds were akin to a music festival, except instead of musical notes and a booming voice through the microphone, people sat attentively in the sound of words and ideas from accomplished authors talking on a range of subjects — some that would change lives, others planting a kernel in their minds, leaving it to germinate later over time.
Even if one could eliminate 20 or even 30 per cent of the crowds coming mainly to ‘just have a fun time’ (in their words, that I overheard), the other 70 per cent is proof that books — and the chance to have insanely complex literary conversations — can get one to traverse large distances.
Back in my hotel room, I listened to a friend deliriously explain how she and her gang followed British actor-writer Stephen Fry from one panel to the other. Or, for another instance, when a little boy — perhaps the youngest in the audience — asked James Shapiro which drama should he start his Shakespearean journey with. Or even that time when Javed Akhtar responded to a rather naïve question on the transformation of Bollywood actors by simply quoting: “Aaj main hoon jahaan kal koi aur tha, yeh bhi ek daur hai, woh bhi ek daur tha.” Yes, he got a grand, ear-splitting applause for that.
For me, these are the tiny anecdotes that sum up JLF, a festival that strives to bring together writers and their audiences together on the same stage in a classical setting. From a few hundred people at the inaugural edition in 2008, if the festival can handle an all-time high footfall of a quarter million people last year, it certainly makes for an invigorating growth story. Sure, the festival has been dogged by controversies over the years, but it still doesn’t take away the fact that JLF has tried to render a nuanced meaning to creative and rational thinking in our society. And if a panel discussion can indeed arouse the interest in Shakespeare in a little child, for me nothing can beat that.
