jaipur. The twelfth edition of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, the world’s largest literary festival, accessible and open to all, ended on a high today as the Festival announced a total footfall of around 400,000 over the last five days and hosted over 500 speakers from around 30 countries including Iceland, Norway, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Uganda, Australia, America, England, South Africa, Denmark and China. Over 250 Sessions featured conversations, debates and dialogue spanning themes ranging from the classics, war, espionage, intelligence, politics, environment and climate change, gender issues, entrepreneurship, science and technology, along with broader areas such as fiction, adapting screenplays, mythology, crime, history, cinema, art, activism and the psychological aftermath of migration.
Conversations on the final day showcased a multiplicity of voices, from iconoclast novelists to experts and policy veterans, reflecting the truly global and relevant reach of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival. With a large chunk of the audiences representing the young, the Festival’s outreach to shape minds and inspire imaginations has tremendous transformative potential. As always, the Festival empowered participants through the stories it told and the importance it continued to emphasise upon the idea of dialogue to seek solutions – something which the divisiveness of the modern world chooses often to dismiss.
The day began with After Trainspotting which had the quirky Scottish author of the cult book Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh, in conversation with Chandrahas Choudhury. Welsh’s work is characterised by a raw Scottish dialect, an edgy, brittle humour and a brutal depiction of Edinburgh life in all its junky seediness. Talking about how his perception of his own work has changed since the Trainspotting movie came out, Welsh said, “You tend to see the actors’ faces rather than the characters and you have to do the terrible thing of reading your own books to get the description of the characters.”
At the NEXA Front Lawn, Breaking Free: A New Kind of Beautiful had Manisha Koirala, Germaine Greer, Madhavi Menon and Sonal Mansingh in conversation with Sharad Paul in a discussion about breaking prejudices in perceptions of female beauty. Koirala stated that it was one’s “art and personality” that make someone beautiful. Madhavi Menon tried to find the reason for the rising number of people who are unhappy with their body; “Capital-ruled media thrives on the concept of Divide and Rule (men and women).”
Beginnings and Endings had Anjum Hasan, Andrew Sean Greer, recent DSC Prize for South Asian Literature-awardee Jayant Kaikini and Mahesh Rao, in a session moderated by Paul McVeigh, where the momentum of the beginning and the sense of an ending which define the circumference of the short story, was in focus. “I really do like quiet beginnings,” said Mahesh Rao, while Anjum Hassan stated that she doesn’t “begin with an idea of the story as a plot, it’s more an impulse”.
