{"id":1098,"date":"2014-01-31T00:03:20","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T19:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=1098"},"modified":"2014-01-31T00:03:20","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T19:03:20","slug":"the-pink-city-magic-and-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2014\/01\/the-pink-city-magic-and-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pink City magic and literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Kiran Nazish<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jaipur: It was all about sensations. It was about the exuberance of sounds, emotions, noise, feelings, aromas, color, joy and an irrepressible vivacity. There seemed to be thousands of people around; people who’d come from Bombay to Kolkatta to Pune to Goa to the US and London, all of them just readers and fans of literature.\u00a0The sounds of laughter and loud, excited conversations drowning out the beeper-machine at the entrance. \u00a0 I walked inside, under a canopy of colorful, Rajastani-style umbrellas hanging from the sky, and into the big lawn where it all was going to happen.<\/p>\n

\"JLF

Image copyright: Kiran Nazish.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"JLF

M. Hanif featured on artist Rohit Chawla’s installation ‘Out of the Box’. Image copyright: Kiran Nazish.<\/p><\/div>\n

There was no other place to be that morning. This was the biggest literature festival in the world and it looked like it. Built on a smaller\u00a0festival that had started indigenously in the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur, the restyled Jaipur Literature Festival was launched by author William Dalrymple in 2006 as the first free literature festival in the world; also perhaps one of the most celebrated, judging by the increasing numbers of attendees. This year the festival broke records by bringing in 220,000 listeners across five days.<\/p>\n

\"No

No wonder he’s so happy. Dalrymple swinging it while Reza Aslan looks on at a musical performance. Copyright: Kiran Nazish.<\/p><\/div>\n

The smell of hot adrak (ginger) chai wafted soothingly through the fresh winter air of Jaipur, in the front lawn. Crowds of people were seated on chairs and on the ground, standing, some on heels, peeking over each others’ heads to catch a glimpse of the tremendous Nobel Prize winner and economist Amartya Sen, who gave the key note address at the festival opening.\u00a0Sen\u2019s keynote address outlined a seven-point vision for a better India, one that included a strong and secular right-wing party and that reserved more space for the arts and humanities in public life.<\/p>\n

\"Adrak

Adrak chai walas. Image copyright: Kiran Nazish.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Seats

Seats filled to capacity for Amartya Sen’s address. Image copyright: Kiran Nazish<\/p><\/div>\n

The hundreds of thousands of attendees listened to about 260 panelists spread across 175 sessions.\u00a0Luminaries like novelist Jhumpa Lahiri,\u00a0celebrity novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo,\u00a0philosopher Michael Sandel and classicist Mary Beard engaged hundreds in every hall simultaneously.<\/p>\n

The programs at the festival were diverse, with leitmotifs of discussions on a variety of different topics, from the US troop withdrawal in Afghanistan to CIA\u2019s war on terror, from female voices and women\u2019s rights to India\u2019s disappearing languages.\u00a0The intriguingly-titled session \u201cWho will rule the world?\u201d had Professor Rana Mitter of the University of Oxford laying out China\u2019s incontrovertible candidacy for superpower status.\u00a0Sessions like \u201cDemocracy Dialogues\u201d that included the author of \u201cWhy India Votes,\u201d discussed India\u2019s current challenges and new developments as a democracy.<\/p>\n

\"Jonathan

Jonathan Franzen\u2019s session with author Chandrahas Choudhury. Image copyright: Kiran Nazish<\/p><\/div>\n

\"The

The stunning Durbar Hall, full to capacity. Image copyright: Kiran Nazish.<\/p><\/div>\n

This was the Jaipur Literature Festival’s biggest and most successful year to date, leaving participants with high expectations for next year’s event.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kiran Nazish is a Pakistani journalist and academic, who currently teaches journalism at a university in India.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Kiran Nazish   Jaipur: It was all about sensations. It was about the exuberance of sounds, emotions, noise, feelings, aromas, color, joy and an irrepressible vivacity. There seemed to be thousands of people around; people who’d come from Bombay to Kolkatta to Pune to Goa to the US and London, all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91],"tags":[141,136,129,134,130,135,131,140,139,137,133,142,132,138],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1127,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions\/1127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}