Day 3 at the Jaipur Literary Festival

The Crowds of People

Shashi Tharoor (on the left)

Tandoori Chicken, Jera Rice, Manchurian Cauliflower

John is doing much better. He will leave Mumbai on Monday for SF. If you want to send an email to John, his email is: johnNsf@gmail.com. John, who is ever so frugal, could be discharged from the hospital today. However, it is a private hospital and they are charging him 10,000 rupees per day,about $160.00. He has a private room, all meals included, a great view of the ocean, free wifi, and room services. He can’t get a hotel room for anywhere near that price, so he has elected to stay in the hospital and use it as a hotel.

There have been many different interruptions to our travel plans that we have experienced over the years. We are now experiencing a new one. We are scheduled to fly to Delhi on the 26^th and transfer to a flight to Bangkok. That has changed; President Obama is flying into Delhi to join Prime Minister Modi in talks. In addition, it is a major National Holiday: Republic Day. There are huge parades. There is a threat of terrorism. The security has been ratcheted up to the highest levels. We have been in advised to come to Delhi a day early and stay near the airiport, so we can be assured of making our flight to Bangkok. Rather than fly in we elected to drive to Delhi, it is only a 4-hour drive. On the 27^th Obama is going to see the Taj Mahal. They are closing the Taj Mahal for his visit. All Cell towers in Agra, the town where the Taj Mahal is located are being turned off for fear of a remote control bomb.

The first hour choices of panels at the Jaipur Literary Festival didn’t interest us. We decided to time arrival to attend the 2^nd hour presentation on Travel Writing. We arrived earlier than expected and a session on the Mahabharata, the founding fable of Gods and Wars that all Indians know. It is immense and complicated. Many moral lessons are drawn from it.  Subject to much interpretation, it is far more than just a book, but its stories are constantly referred to Indian life and art. Two scholars were discussing the relevancy of its stories to family life. We greatly enjoyed the portion we heard.

The next session was on travelling writing. There was a panel of 7 travel writers each of whom read a portion from their book. Their styles and voices were different. To us, and I think the audience, the best was a woman travel writer named Brigid Keenan. She is married to a diplomat, and traveled with him all over the globe. She writes extremely humorously. She read from her book: Diplomatic Baggage. If the entire book is as good as the section she read, it must be a delight to read.

The next panel was entitled: Indian Shastra. It was about contemporary Indian problems and solutions. It featured two writers who have just published books about the challenges Prime Minister Modi is facing. Shashi Tharoor has it all. He is good looking, he is an intellectual and he is a member of parliament. He is a magnificent speaker. His politics are great and the solutions he proposes to India’s myriad problems seem appropriate. He also probably murdered his wife last year, or maybe he didn’t. According to the police, Shashi had a huge argument with his wife on a flight to Delhi about Shashi’s relationship with a Pakistani woman reporter. That next day his wife was found dead, in their luxury hotel room. The police are still investigating looking for the culprit. In spite of this unfortunate death, Shashi was reelected to Parliament. Everyone loves a good mystery - we will see how this turns one turns out.

Shashi is a member of the Congress Party that held power for most of India’s independence. In a huge landslide more people voted for Modi, who is from the BJP party, then anyone, anywhere has ever received. He has huge political capital. Shashi and his co-panelist, the reporter and author Mihir Sharma were in agreement about Modi: he is all talk and hasn’t taken decisive actions to free the Indian economy. In addition, the BJP is very Hindu centric and India has a large non-Hindu Muslim population that is feeling marginalized. We wish the panel was more balanced with a pro-Modi speaker. Their criticism of Modi was unrelenting. He has only been in power 6 months.

Strangely it made us appreciate Obama more. When he was first elected with a mandate he did get Health Care through. He is opening up to Cuba and getting us out of the mess of the Middle East. He was supportive of gay rights and appointed two good women on the Supreme Court. There is much he has accomplished in spite of the Republican opposition.

The next panel was featured Rohan Murty is a rich smart kid. He is 28 and a Fellow at Harvard. He has a PHD in Computer Science, but his passion is ancient Indian texts, hence through his foundation he is sponsoring a 100-year effort by Harvard to translate and publish Indian texts in English: The Murty Library. This is the largest effort ever by the Harvard University Press. Seven panelists, each bilingual, recited translated texts in English and their native tongue. The poems were great and listening to the various languages was like a symphony. The oldest known poem by a woman was 150 BC in Pali. The most beautiful to our ears was the reading of a poem in Persian. The funniest to listen to was old Tamil, which is the fastest spoken language I have ever heard.

This whole effort to preserve and publish these ancient texts is highly esoteric and scholarly, however they hope some of these books will be adopted by Indian Schools and replace the Western Canon of literature or at least augment it with Indian Classical writings.

The final panel of the day was about writing about sex. Had to be a good panel. India is a fairly conservative country about sex (at least in portraying it on screen or in books). With a population of 1.2 billion people they obviously are doing it, just not writing about it. I have read several of Nicholas Baker’s books. He was on the panel with a lesbian author from England: Sarah Waters and Hanif Kureishi the gay writer of My Beautiful Launderette. Best is having sex, next best is reading about it or watching it, least is talking about how to writing about it. The panel was funny and political. Hanif Kureishi lashed out repeatedly against puritanical Islam. I liked Sarah Waters comment that when someone writes a murder mystery no one considers the author a murderer, yet one some one writes a sex scene people think that this is how the author has sex.

The last panel was on the tragedy of Bhopal. 30 years ago the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal experienced an accident releasing toxic gases that killed thousands of people and injured 10's of thousands. The prevailing winds carried the gasses towards the homes of the poorest of the poor. No one has been held responsible, no one has ever apologized, and no one cares. The tragedy continues, the site has never been cleaned up and citizens who survived continue to have health problems. The cause for the disaster has basically been swept under the rug. Javier Moro has written a book: Five Minutes Past Midnight about the tragedy that will hopefully stimulate some appropriate action.

After the depressing but enlightening tale of Bhopal we returned to our hotel and actually had dinner under the stars (and a heater). Drinks in the cozy bar and then to bed.