This past Saturday was Day1 at Bangalore Literature Festival and the only day we could have attended it, of course, due to the commitments social butterflies like us had. Bangalore Literature Festival a.k.a.BLF has made it super convenient to reach the venue for the past two years by providing an e-shuttle at the Vidhana Soudha Metro Terminal and we have been availing the same for consecutive two years. As always, the Lalit Ashok grounds were abuzz and throbbing with hues of color, and laughter, smiles, conversations abound.
It took us a few minutes to get oriented with the four different venues and we headed to our own sessions as pre decided. I left Suva at the Valley entrance to attend Hindi aur Hindustani (Chandan Pandey, Rakshanda Jalil with Manisha Chaudhury), I went on my way towards the Lit Lawn to listen to The Past is a Country: Families in Fiction (Amit Chaudhuri, Kiran Desai, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Romesh Gunesekera with Raghav Rao). I had heard and read Kiran Desai before, I had read Amit Chaudhuri before, and I had a book of Quế, but I had not known Raghav and Romesh. The session created the perfect appetizer for me as it lay the map to know the person behind Raghav and Quế. The way Amit Chaudhuri connected the fall of Berlin War and how the entire world changed post that in literature and our small lives in distant world was a refreshing take from whatever I had read and heard so far. Quế performed her poetry on her mother and what a powerful performer she is! Raghav Rao, the host of the session caught my attention as being unassumingly kind and yet is merely 33 years of age. Quế towards the close of the session announced that Raghav’s book was launching at 3 pm at BLF. I frantically searched on the schedule pamphlet and found the session happening at Red Couch later that day. That very first session left me with a lot of questions to reflect upon.
Post a quick break, when we discovered the serpentine queue to get just a cup of coffee is not really worth it, we headed for the next session at the Waterfront, Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (Sumana Roy with Jeet Thayil). Jeet Thayil is a familiar name in our household, and we have attended multiple sessions of his and I am in love with his anthology of Indian poetry “The Penguin Book of Indian Poets”, but it was Sumana Roy who cracked us up with her sensitivity and articulation of that sensitivity. The way she approached each question that Jeet posed for her brought her reflective soul more to the open. Rarely have I come across authors like her who talk about nuances of language in our everyday lives, the mistakes we make and how we should never be ashamed. She spoke of her local patriotism, and I connected to that deeply and my soul felt lighter in her small laughs and precise adjustment of her oversized glasses. I felt an urge to buy a copy of her book she spoke about, “Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries” and get it signed by her. Post session I went on my way to the book marketplace managed by our own Atta Galatta team. I must say every year they do a fabulous job of curating, sorting, and arranging the books in the easiest fashion so that you can quickly grab the copy, pay and get it signed without waiting too long. While waiting on the queue to get the copy signed a gentleman from California was standing right behind me. May be because the two sessions had left me mellow or may be the anguish I was feeling internally I struck a conversation with him. He asked about my whereabouts and I his. And then as I recounted my previous year at BLF, he seemed to be very pleased and since my journey back from US was also something he is looking forward to undertake sometime in the future; he said he was feeling hopeful after talking to me. He passionately shared his love for Sumana Roy’s poetry that he has read and re read and found it captivating. A couplet of conversation with Sumana Roy and the book signing later, I found myself looking for her poetry book “Out of Syllabus” mentioned by my fellow book-signature seeker.
Rushing towards the Lit Lawn a few minutes late for Prime-time Mayhem (Amrita Shah, Anuradha Sengupta, Rajdeep Sardesai with Amrita Tripathi), it seemed the session lived up to its name. There was not a single chair left empty in the biggest venue and as Rajdeep Sardesai’s booming voice echoed through the greens more and more of our generation who have been enamored by his news anchoring in the old days of NDTV queued up at Hamlin. Primetime is not an easy topic to delve into, but I felt humility when Rajdeep questioned the journalist’s moral and dilemma and said there is hope left still as people really can tell quality only if they spend their attentive bandwidth to these critical aspects which affects not only one life but multitudes of lives. Marketing, advertising, subscription-based media were discussed among the panelists, but it still boiled down to the intent of the provider and the core of the consumer.
We spread ourselves out in the lawn next to the Waterfront and had our peanut butter and turkey sandwiches tete a tete – ing on the different takeaways in our personal lives. Raghav Rao’s session was coming up next and we found our way through the back of the festival where the Hi Life Exhibition was going on and the smell from the fried noodles hit our olfactory senses with a gusto. Inside the Red Couch venue, I spotted his (Raghav Rao’s mom) in the front row patiently waiting for her son’s session to begin. I knew her from the previous session when she sat right next to me and her younger son was telling her to make sure the mobile was on silent exactly like I sermonize my parents. Raghav revealed he was brought up partially in the US and mostly in Rishi Valley School and he feels the school was more his home than his home as he came home only during the vacations, and it was his friends who knew him even better than his family. He spoke about his vulnerabilities with such élan that it felt like I was listening to a grey-haired matured man rather than a 33-year-old boy who had just written his debut novel "Missy". He also spoke about the phase of going through an imposter syndrome while writing in the shoes of a woman protagonist in his debut novel and how his editor (a woman) and his agent (also a woman) gave him courage and reinforcement to carry on. Raghav struck me as a very kind boy raised with empathy and compassion. I observed at the very beginning of the session he poured water into the empty glass in front of him and then he went on to fill the second glass for the host. That small gesture gave a peek into the boy’s true character.
Before heading off for the day we attended the very last session Storytelling and Activism: Rewriting the Social Script (Amit Chaudhuri, Kamalakar Bhat, Srikar Raghavan with Karthik Venkatesh) again informed about it from my first session. Since I am a great believer and practice storytelling myself, I was compelled to listen to Amit Chaudhuri talk against it. But since morning as it was happening that one thing was leading me to the other, I discovered this young boy Srikar who had taken a de-route after completing his Engineering to become a writer. “Rama, Bhima, Soma” is his first book, his first journey to document the last few decades that has shaped this state of Karnataka. He, again, just like Raghav stood out to me as a boy with great respect for others’ space and time and great maturity for this age to deal and even enjoy self-limitations people possess. He spoke more with a journalistic bend of mind, not trying to be a judge of what all he has uncovered but rather trying put those pieces together to see if they create the picture of today’s Karnataka.
As we rode the metro back, we discussed a book about two young people, rather three young people portrayed in the book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin and draw parallels in our lives. After a brief sojourn at home we headed towards my brother’s place for a Christmas get-together with friends and family. Even amidst the carols and games, my mind kept pulsating, and my heart kept throbbing for the love and hope I saw in those two young authors, Raghav and Srikar. I felt hopeful, and in my mind, thanked their parents profusely who have brought up such beautiful minds and have given them the space to grow, thrive and make the world a warmer place. I glanced at my son as he kept talking excitedly about the Millenium Falcon book he had received and inwardly felt relaxed and extremely grateful to have this banter and goofball in my life.
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