The 10th Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) completed its second day on Friday, with writers, artists and film-makers regaling the audience with discussions, anecdotes and extended question-answer sessions.
In the morning, Anne Waldman and Kunga Tenzin Dorji were in conversation with journalist Pragya Tiwari about Ms. Waldman’s collaborations with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets. She compared the activist concerns of the Beats to the Standing Rock protests. “We have so many issues and so little time,” Ms. Waldman said.
Veteran actor Rishi Kapoor was a big hit with the audience on the front lawn of the Diggi Palace, where he was in conversation with Rachel Dwyer.
“It is very rare that a father and a son are active and working in the same era [in the film industry]. But I am really enjoying this new phase of my life,” Mr. Kapoor said.
He spoke about his recently released memoir, which was “more about my flaws than my accomplishments.” Punctuating his talk with the choicest anecdotes about 1970s and 1980s Bollywood, Mr. Kapoor frequently had the audience in splits.
Novelists Manu Joseph and Karan Mahajan spoke about writing novels that are rooted in reality — but the conversation soon branched off into topics as miscellaneous as Donald Trump, the unrealistic niceness of Indian men in literary fiction and the problem of a male novelist trying to conjure believable female characters.
Trump presidency
Commenting on the Trump presidency, Mr. Mahajan, who has lived in the U.S. for the last 10 years, said: “What I think is funny about Trump is that he’s like a novelist, in a way. Recently, when he was talking about his inauguration, he spoke about all these funny little things like might it rain during the ceremony and so on. He kept ranting about the rain for quite a while. He has the pettiness that a novelist requires in order to talk about all these little things.”
Mr. Joseph and Mr. Mahajan agreed that novelists were not the best analysts of the present, as opposed to the past, on which they could throw light in a way that historians could not.
The festival’s cashless transaction drive, however, met a premature end on the second day.
The QR code-driven system did not work because of the sheer footfall. As a result, the festival book store — as well as other stalls at the venue — were not accepting cashless transactions. An employee at the book store even said: “People who had recharged their e-wallets through cards are facing problems in reimbursing their payments.”
