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”.

People!

2012 is about to be quite a year; doomsday predictions notwithstanding.

With a star studded line-up of authors and titles to choose from, rest assured the literary roller-coaster at INDIAreads is not about to stop anytime soon.

Check out these gems that may be pre-ordered at INDIAreads shortly;

1. I’ve Got Your Number – Sophie Kinsella (Feb 2012): When Poppy loses her engagement ring and her mobile all in the same disastrous evening, it seems making use of a phone she finds by chance, abandoned in a hotel bin, is the obvious solution.

But inevitably her life becomes entangled with the real owner of the phone, a high-flying businessman called Sam who becomes increasingly irritated when Poppy can’t resist meddling in his affairs…

2. The Oath of The Vayuputras – Amish Tripathi (Oct 2012): Book Three in the hugely popular Shiva Trilogy – after ‘The Immortals of Meluha’ and ‘The Secret of The Nagas’ – keeps the feeding frenzy going.

3. Emerging India: Economics, Politics And Reforms  – Bimal Jalan (Jan 2012): A collection of essays written over 20 years, this is an essential read for anyone seriously interested in the history and future of India’s development as a nation.

4. Didi: A Political Biography – Monobina Gupta (Jan 2012): Gupta brings her experience as a journalist and commentator on the politics in West Bengal to paint a fascinating portrait of the woman who defeated the longest-serving communist government in the world; and is fast emerging as one of the most important political figures in India today.

5. When Loss is Gain – Pavan K Varma (Jan 2012): Action-packed yet contemplative, Pavan K. Varma’s first novel is a powerful story of love and loss, despair and hope, chance and destiny, and the true meaning of joy and sorrow in every human life.

6. Rahul – Jatin Gandhi & Veenu Sandhu (Jan 2012): .Who is Rahul Gandhi—the real man—beneath the hype and the hatchet jobs? What are the ideas and influences that propel him? Who are his advisers? And how will he tackle his new responsibilities as his mother, Sonia Gandhi, makes way for him? Two young journalists, Jatin Gandhi and Veenu Sandhu, trace the evolution of the Rahul brand and explore the fascinating relationship between modernity and dynasty in this incisive political biography.

7. Neglected Poems – Gulzar (Jan 2012): Neglected only in name, these poems represent Gulzar at his creative and imaginative best, as he meditates on nature, delves into human psychology, explores great cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and New York , and confronts the most telling moments of everyday life.

8. Micro – Michael Crichton (Jan 2012): An instant classic in the vein of Jurassic Park, this boundary-pushing novel has all the hallmarks of Michael Crichton s greatest adventures with its combination of pulse-pounding thrills, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary research.

Three men are found dead in a locked second-floor office in Honolulu. There is no sign of struggle, though their bodies are covered in ultra-fine, razor sharp cuts. With no evidence, the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. But the murder weapon is still in the room, almost invisible to the human eye…

9. Smart Trust – Stephen M. R. Covey (Foreword by Indra Nooyi) (Jan 2012): Find out why trusted people are more likely to get hired or promoted, get the best projects and bigger budgets, and are last to be laid off. This book will forever shift your perspective as it reveals and validates once and for all the transformational power of trust. Reading Smart Trust will help you thrive in an increasingly unpredictable marketplace.

10. The Innocent – David Baldacci (Apr 2012): Freelance hitman Will Robie gets a job from the US government. Even as he expertly nails his target – a suspected enemy of the country – he sees something at the scene of crime which he suspects will have deadly consequences …

Does he need to change sides to save lives, including his own…?

11. Untitled Memoir – Salman Rushdie (Sep 2012): The memoir will cover Rushdie’s childhood, his family life – he has been married four times – and his time in exile.

12. The Limpopo Academy of Private Investigation – Alexander McCall Smith (Apr 2012): The new installment in the perpetually delightful and bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

Precious Ramotswe is back and, as usual, her plate is full.  She’s called in to tackle a mysterious disciplinary problem at her adopted daughter’s school. Her infinitely trustworthy assistant, Grace Makutsi, is having trouble adjusting to wedded bliss; a problem to test even the formidable talents of Mma Ramotswe. And the estimable Clovis Andersen, author of The Principles of Private Investigation – the No. 1 Ladies’ prized manual – has arrived, right there, in Botswana, on a case of his own. Bush tea, anyone?

13. Home – Toni Morrison (May 2012): The latest novel from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.

An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. His home–and himself–may no longer be as he remembers it, but Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from; a place he’s hated all his life. As Frank revisits childhood memories and the war, that leave him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding himself–and his home.

14. Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel (May 2012): In this sequel to the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall, Mantel explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. From history’s darkroom, this novel offers a speaking picture to the modern world; a vision of Tudor England so recognizable it defies archaism. It is the work of one of our greatest writers at the peak of her powers.

15. Betrayal – Danielle Steel (Mar 2012): A renowned film director confronts an act of unimaginable treachery—and the first devastating blow will not be the last.

In this riveting novel, Danielle Steel reveals the dark side of fame and fortune. At the same time, she brilliantly captures a woman’s will to navigate a minefield of hurt and loss—towards a new beginning.

16. Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity – Katherine Boo (Feb 2012): In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book by the Pulitzer winner, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human; thanks in no small part to three years of uncompromising reporting.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

People !!!!

Now is the time to subscribe to INDIAreads.

We’re giving away a Free Bestseller with every purchase of an INDIAreads Smart/Bonanza Plan in 2012.

You heard us; our shelves runneth over.

Only for New Members, though.

Existing Subscribers will have to settle for our massive discounts and flawless service; it’s quite sad, really.

So please hurry and mooch off of us.

For a complete overview of all INDIAreads plans, please click here. (for Delhi/NCR)

or here. (for Other Metros)

and here. (for Rest of India)

NOTE: Offer valid only till midnight, January 2012.

image courtesy jeanxreviews

We all know him as the man who made us give a look closely at the Monalisa and scan The Last Supper for hidden clues. But before there was The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown was on a different career path. Here’s a look at some unknown and rather interesting facts about the bestselling author.

• Brown graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English in 1986, after which he turned to music, creating effects with synthesizer, and self-producing a children’s cassette entitled Synth Animals which included a collection of tracks such as Happy frogs and suzuki elephants.

• In 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and pianist.

• Dan Brown’s first three novels met with little success. It was his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, which hit the New York Times Best Seller List in its first week in release in 2003.

• The Da Vinci Code’s success led to Dan Brown’s earlier novels flying off book shelves. In 2004, all four of Dan Brown’s novels hit the New York Times Best Seller List in the same week.

• In 2005, Dan Brown made TIME Magazine’s list of the One Hundred Most Influential People of the Year. Brown also placed at Number Twelve in Forbe’s Magazine’s 2005 Celebrity 100 List. The Times estimated that Dan Brown’s income from The DaVinci Code sales alone was in excess of $250 million.

• In 2006, his novel The Da Vinci Code was released as a film by Columbia Pictures. One of the songs, “phiano”, which Brown wrote and performed, was listed as part of the film’s soundtrack.

• The fictional Langdon’’s alama mater is Phillips Exter Academy, the same school that Brown attended.

• Brown has told fans that he uses inversion therapy to help with writer’s block. He uses gravity boots and says, “hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.”

Ruskin Bond

Indian author of British descent, he is considered an icon among children’s writers and Indian authors. His writings have won him both tremendous critical acclaim as well as a long list of fans through out the literary world. Compared to William Wordsworth, most of Bond’s writings show a very strong influence from the social life in the hill stations at the foothills of the Himalayas, where he spent his childhood. In 1992 he received the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing, and was was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children’s literature.

Some of his noteable works are:

The Eyes Have It

A Flight of Pigeons

A Woman on Platform 8

Delhi Is Not Far

Edward de Bono

Author, physian and inventor, Edward De Bono is known as the originator of the term lateral thinking. He has written 82 books with translations into 41 languages. De Bono’s work has become particularly popular in the sphere of business, and his methods have migrated into corporate training courses designed to help employees and executives think outside the box.

Some of his faous works are:

Six Thinking Hats

Lateral Thinking

I Am Right, You Are Wrong

Simplicity

Check out the titles available for rent and purchase from these bestselling authors at the INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.

Diane Duane

American science fiction and fantasy author, she studied nursing and practised psychiatric nurse for two years before her first novel was published in 1979. She is a two-time John W. Campbell Award nominee for best new writer.

Some of her famous works are:

Young Wizards series

Feline Wizards

Star Trek

Net Force (co authored with Tom Clany and Steve Pieczenik)

Fred Thomas Saberhagen

American science fiction and fantasy fiction writer most famous for his Berserker series, he served in as a pilot during the Korean war. In his vampire novels, the vampires are the protagonists (including the famous Dracula) and are based on the premise that they are morally equal to normal humans, having the power to do good or evil.

Some of his famous works are:

Bram Sroker’s Dracula (novelization of the movie)

Empire of the East Series

Book of Lost Swords

Berserker Series

Bertrand Russell

British philosopher, mathematician, historian, socialist, and social critic, he spent most of his life in England, although he was born in Wales where he also died, aged 97. Russell led the British “revolt against idealism” in the early 1900s. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some of his famous works are:

German Social Democracy (1896)

The Analysis of Mind (1921)

Icarus (1924)

Unarmed Victory (1963)

Check out the titles available for rent and purchase from these bestselling authors at the INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.

L. Frank Baum

American author of children’s books, best known for writing The Wizard of Oz. He had a deep love for  theatre and performed different roles in many plays,  under the stage names of Louis F. Baum and George Brooks. His works predicted such century-later commonplaces as television, laptop computers (The Master Key), wireless telephones (Tik-Tok of Oz), and the ubiquity of advertising on clothing (Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Work). Baum made use of several pseudonyms for some of his other, non-Oz books.

Some of his famous works are:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Mother Goose in Prose (1897)

The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale (1901)

The Fate of a Crown (1905)

Katherine Anne Porter

Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist and political activist, Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America on the year of its release. Critically acclaimed for her short stories, her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.

Some of her famous works are:

Maria Concepcion (1922)

Rope (1928)

The Circus (1944)

A Christmas Story (1967)

Check out the titles available for rent and purchase from these betselling authors at the INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.

Eoin Colfer

Irish author and comedian, he is most famous for creating the Artemis Fowl series. In September 2008, Colfer was commissioned to write the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. To date the majority of his works have reached the New York Times Bestseller list at least once.

Some of his famous works are:

Benny and Omar (1998)

Artemis Fowl series

The Supernaturalist (2004)

Airman (2008)

Leanne Banks

American award winning writer and author of over 50 romance novels, Leanne’s first novel was relead in 1991 and won her numerous awards and titles.

Some of her famous works are:

Never a Bride (1991)

Pendleton Brothers series

Masters brothers series

The Logan seies

Check out the titles available for rent and purchase from these betselling authors at the INDIAreads Online Library cum Bookstore.