I say again, lest my last post failed to register with the ‘deaf futtbucker’ demographic hiding amongst you: The Jaipur Literature Festival 2012 is about to get underway.

There are Lit Fests and there are Lit Fests. This one, though, is not your average overdose of book readings and (equally lackluster) panel discussions. The authors will not brood and the audience will not snooze.

For one, it’s a free festival.

So you see..? It is a chance for bottom feeders (like you) to approach Salman Rushdie, sip coffee with Michael Ondaatje, rub shoulders with Amish Tripathi, or admire Fatima Bhutto in toto for her, er, literary excellence.

Choosing what events to attend may be the only stress of the day for your cheap derriere. You’ll pay nothing to get in; then mull difficult session choices over a free lunch.

The atmosphere will be informal, interdisciplinary, and infectious. Actors, directors, fashion designers, economists, travellers, politicians, scientists, students, bloggers and all manner of urban hipsters will congregate in the gardens of an old and intimate Rajasthani palace to spend 5 days “in conversation”.

At night, the wine will flow. Expect the stage to come alive with the Dionysian revelry that typically follows a literary salon.

But there’s a catch.

Thanks to a rise in the number of programmes (and an ever increasing attendance) over the years, the venue is straining to breaking point and the nature of the event is changing. Last year, J.M. Coetzee had to clamber over hundreds of people squeezed next to speakers, crouched next to seats, or sitting on folded newspapers on the churned-up grass.

To reach the stage.

Those who have experienced the intimacy of earlier editions of the JLF lament that it is now impossible to have conversations with their favourite writers. The authors, too, may bemoan the festival’s increasingly unwieldy size.

Junot Diaz, a witty and thoughtful commentator on the lot of migrants in America, used one session to blame capitalism for encouraging writers to pursue their work not because they have something important to say, but for the sake of getting approval from the largest possible audience. “We know that we need less applause and more conversation,” he told a packed room.

Promptly—inevitably—the audience clapped.

One can certainly nitpick, and criticism has always been a blood sport in India. My money, though, is still on Dalrymple (co-Director of the event) to put up a great show. The self-confessed “Indophile” has always had an acute understanding of the way things work (or don’t work) in India (a fact amply demonstrated in his books). Vikram Seth may well buy George Herbert’s house and own an umbrella but he won’t ever really be ‘British’; while one may safely proclaim Dalrymple is more ‘Indian’ now than when he first came here (as a backpacker in 1989), and less of an anglophile than a lot of us.

Ergo: Mister William aage badho, hum tumhaare saath hain.

At the 2010 Lit Fest;

1. Catherine Clement, French intellectual and author of ‘Edwina and Nehru: A Novel’ and Nayantara Sahgal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece discussed the roaring affair between Jinnah and Sarojini Naidu. “It is well known in France. Why is it not spoken of in India?” asked Clement. Came the reply, “Because our national leaders are not allowed to have sex organs.” Sahgal and Clement also agreed that Sahgal’s ‘maamu’ was a beautiful man while Edwina was ‘nice’.

2. The toothsome Bangladeshi author Shazia Omar had to be shepherded through crowds of autograph-seeking men. Subsequent to getting her autograph on brand new notebooks came the question, “What is your name, madam?”

3. Hanif Kureishi, irritable about being on a panel called ‘Migrant Words’, snapped, “I have moved a few kilometres within London. That’s the extent of my migration.”

4. At one Litfest venue (the Mughal Tent), speaker Amitava Kumar stopped to salute William Dalrymple, who’d just entered. He went on: “I hear Dalrymple is soon taking over the world. This is how the East India Company began; one Mughal tent at a time.”

5. Hearing a ‘whoosh-whoosh’ sound, Wole Soyinka paused mid-reading to peer down his chin at the mike: “Is my beard doing something?”

Earlier, Soyinka had the pleasure of being introduced by Urvashi Butalia as ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread’.

6. Sidin Vadukut (then first-time author of comic novel Dork), on the Jaipur Litfest experience: “It’s like a college fest, except you don’t go home — you just grow older.”

7. During a session titled ‘Bin Laden after Bush’, Javed Akhtar jumped out of the audience to accuse Steve Coll of being part of an American conspiracy to pretend Bin Laden was still alive. This, in January 2010.

At the 2009 Lit Fest;

1. Authors Ira Pande and Namita Gokhale, cousins, began a session by chattering jovially amongst themselves, completely oblivious to the audience, and apologising for the same later: “Sorry about this, when Namita and I get together we turn into a Johar Mahmood show and forget all about the audience.”

2. Bruce Palling, a journalist for over 40 years and well-known travel writer, recalls seeing Colin Thubron being addressed scornfully by a visa officer at the Indian High Commission in London.

Thubron, whose novels and travel books have stopped just short of the Man Booker Prize but earned him the sobriquet of “gentleman traveller”, was apparently trying to assert himself as a delegate for the Jaipur festival but the documents he was presenting, rather than earning him a visa, seemed only fit to draw derision. Bruce, with all his experience of India pulled him gently aside and counselled in a whisper, “Colin. Just go back home and come again tomorrow with an application for a tourist visa.”

3. Amitabh Bachhan, attending the festival to release ‘Bachchanalia’ (a book in his honour) was seen brandishing his trademark native wit. When a crowd gathered on an overhanging terrace came too close to the edge and an announcer requested them to move back, Amitabh translated, “Peeche hat jao nahin toh aap meri godh mein giroge!” (Please get back, lest you fall in my lap)

4. When a young school girl asked Nandan Nilekani, what prompted him to write a book, the Infosys co-founder replied, “I wanted an invitation to the Jaipur Literature Festival.”

5. Vikram Seth revealed that he had to buy a copy of his own book to read in one of the sessions, as he’d arrived at the festival without any copies.

6. Final Night. Writers’ Ball at the Jaipur City Palace. Chetan Bhagat was seen asking Vikram Seth for an autograph.

As India’s young rock-star novelist tried to convince the cranky genius (who sat there fretting with a wrinkled brow) to write something meaningful on a scrap of paper for his sister (or someone), a journalist (standing with Seth) noted that he might consider adapting the kind of line Asimov is reputed to have taken in such situations: “I’ll never forget our marvellous night on the beach.”

Seth guffawed, and Bhagat got his autograph.

Homies!

The Jaipur Literature Festival (20-24 Jan ’12) is about to get underway.

It’s been a bumpy ride - The inaugural event in 2006 drew a crowd of about 100 attendees, including some who “appeared to be tourists who had simply got lost,” according to the event’s co-director William Dalrymple.

And the naysayers feel the festival is all about pretenders and post-colonial sahibs. Like Hartosh Bal; in a caustic piece appearing in Open Magazine in 2011, he wrote the festival  “works not because it is a literary enterprise, but because it ties us to the British literary establishment”—exemplified, first and foremost, by Dalrymple himself (whom he went on to deride as the “pompous arbiter of literary merit in India”). Incidentally, Bal is an Oxbridge-educated Indian who sounds more British than the Queen herself.

Dalrymple hit back immediately, lambasting Bal’s screed as racist cant akin to “pouring shit through an immigrant’s letterbox”.

Sadly, things are less acrimonious now.

Let’s take one final, longing look back at some of the funnier and more candid moments from events of years past. To set the mood for the serious business that follows.

Literary foreplay, if you will.

At the 2011 Jaipur Lit Fest;

1. Orhan Pamuk, that grave purveyor of melancholy, is evidently also a funny man.

During the Q&A session, someone asked Pamuk if the theme of his new novel ‘Museum of Innocence’ was whether philosophical love was deeper than physical love. Without skipping a beat, Pamuk responded, “That depends on the penetration.”

2. Junot Diaz (author of ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao‘), during a session titled ‘Storyteller-in-Chief’, told a packed crowd under the Mughal tent, “I can’t imagine anything more foreign to Indian readers than the Dominican Republic or New Jersey. But white people were looking for YOU when they found US.”

3. During one of the interactive sessions, Gulzar amused the audiences with little anecdotes on the birth of songs in Hindi cinema before Javed Akhtar (who arrived 20 minutes late) could join him. He later apologised to Akhtar saying,” ‘Maaf Kijiyega, main inhe behla raha tha (Forgive me, I was just managing them).

4. During a Q&A session, a school girl asked Gulzar, “There was simplicity in our old songs. The vocabulary was simple and it touched our hearts. Why can’t we have a similar vocabulary in new songs?” Gulzar shot back, “You have used ‘vocabulary’ twice in your question. Can you tell me what it is called in Hindi?

5. An angry Indian editor from a well-known and respected publishing house was heard  describing Dalrymple (who at last year’s festival was reading his own texts while Paban Das Baul sang and swayed, even as certain sections felt as the Director of the Festival he should not have been hogging so much of the limelight) as “that self-promoting ‘White Mughal‘ who has turned down all my authors”.