Jaipur Literature Festival
on Roundabouts in Delhi (India), 25/Jan/2011 19:05, 34 days ago
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Nam Le, Leila Aboulela, Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieHaving not yet been outside of Delhi since I arrived on 12thDecember, I decided that the Jaipur Literature Festival would be my first trip out of the city. It also seemed quite appropriate as it was through literature that I was first introduced to India. Brought up on Rudyard’s Kipling’s ‘Just So Stories’ and ‘The Jungle Book,’ my mum was the one to then later introduce me to R.K.Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Raja Rao, and Adrundati Roy’s, ‘God of Small Things’ and Rohinton Mistry’s ‘A Fine Balance,’ still remain two of my favourite novels.When we arrived in Jaipur I was shocked by how much empty space there was. The streets were relatively clear and even the smallest shop fronts seemed to be about double the size of those you’d find in Delhi. The last six weeks of living in Delhi have clearly turned me into more of a Delhite than I’d realised, as instead of revelling in all this space I found myself thinking, “what a waste, they could have built two shops where there’s only one,” and, “look at all that spareparking space, you could fit in three outdoor markets, some vegetable carts, a four storey apartment and still have room for some camels out the front.”Arriving at the Literature Festival was like stepping into an oasis of literary calm. We left the street noise behind and walked through tented tree lined avenues draped with brightly coloured fabric. I hadn’t quite known what to expect as I’d never actually been to a literature festival before. I suppose the best way I could relate to the atmosphere and the mixture of people there was a bit like standing in the lobby of the Royal Festival Hall in London where all at once you encounter a mixture oftheatre luvvies, tourists, local residents, music and literary students, socialites that are there to be seen and people that have wondered in off the street out of curiosity. Yet again I was thrown into an oddly familiar but out of context world.The Literature Festival wasn’t quite what I’d expected as it wasn’t solely focused on Indian literature but was a celebration of writing across the globe and involved travel writers, political commentators and fiction writers. I attended some really interesting talks such as one on the issue of Caste in India that included several Dalit writers, a conversation with Patrick French about his latest book, ‘A Portrait of India,’ in which he talked about the process of meeting with and interviewing the various characters in the book and how their stories evolved. I was also introduced by Zoe to Rory Stewart, her ‘hero’ as she described him who wrote ‘The Places in Between’ about his 6,000 mile journey on foot from Turkey to Bangladesh in 2001.I was quite sad when it came to leaving on Sunday afternoon and if I went again I’d probably extend my stay by a day or two as there are only so many literary minds you can cram into a day and a half. It was a great way to spend a weekend though and even the eight hour bus journey home to Delhi (it should usually take about four hours but we took the cheaper government bus alternative) was an experience. We were fortunate to have seats and did not have to travel the eight hours in the overhead cupboards (sleeper seats which have sliding doors like cupboards and are not quite high enough to sit up in but not quite long enough to lie down in). As we left Jaipur I spotted one, two, then hundreds of children out on the tenement rooftops flying brightly coloured paper kites. This carried on for the next few miles and in between the trees were papered red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink and orange with abandoned kites that had become entangled in their branches. It was just like a scene from a book.