High heels, Prada bags, Charles & Keith ankle boots, Sula wine, exposed cleavages and a private jet. Lit events are the new cool for the beautiful people, if the 6th Jaipur Literature Festival is an indicator. I just returned from there. Next week Karachi is hosting its lit fest. At least two of my Delhi friends (authors Sadia Dehlvi and Rakhshanda Jalil) are packing their bags. Will Karachi be as glitzy as Jaipur, which was the place to see and be seen at? There was music, kisses, vodka, and, yes, it didnt harm to have Pamuk as a prop.
What I saw in Jaipur was a Woodstock of the internationally accented and expensively groomed. The Page 3 People, aka P3P, arrived in Diggi Palace, the festival venue, in the form of Ayesha Thapar, a Delhi socialite seen at every fashion week party, club opening night and art gallery bash. Reaching the front lawn, she exclaimed, Oh God, all the riff-raff has come here. Perhaps she, too, spotted Romi Chopra, Sunita Kohli and Gauri Keeling in the crowd. Maybe she meant fashion designer Poonam Bhagat, present as well. Madhu Trehan and Suhel Seth came as panelists.
A two-minute anthropologist classified the women attendees in two categories: 1) The Bag Ladies with their Pradas and Louis Vuittons, who were sending flying kisses to one another while being crushed by the weekend crowd. 2) The Indigo Sari ladies who with their grey hair, sensible shoes, draped-on-the-arm shawls and cigarettes were scurrying from one talk to another, complaining that chairs should be reserved for people above 55.
The five-day carnival had the right literary pretensions: 223 authors from 20 countries. But keeping the focus on the P3P flitting like butterflies in the literary garden, I stayed away from post-colonial-post-modern-post-everything crap. There was more happening action elsewhere: Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk cosying up to wine-guzzling Booker prize-winning girlfriend Kiran Desai, Kashmiri author Basharat Peer networking with foreign correspondents, Pakistani ambassador Shahid Malik snubbing festival co-organiser William Dalrymple by asking him to confine himself to sufis and Mughals (In a session with Lahore-based author Ahmad Rashid, Dalrymple said, Why cant ISI realizs that its policies are screwing up Pakistan?).
Being a book-lover, I should have been thrilled to breathe the air exhaled by the reclusive South African novelist J M Coetzee, standing an inch away from me. But the transcendental moment came when Delhi socialite Bina Ramani sat next to my feet literally at an over-crowded session in which the panelists gossiped about the sex life of Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten.
The festival started on Friday, which was just the lull before the P3P storm. On Saturday, Delhi gatecrashed. It was as if the tony Khan Market had landed in Diggi Palace. The entire place was taken over by the Capitals bubble people, the kind who buy wrist-watches at DLF Emporio mall, brown bread in Sugar n Spice, and books at the cocktail launches of Le Meridian. How did you come? asked one socialite to another in the Merrill Lynch Mughal Tent as Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart and The New Yorkers John Lee Anderson shared notes on Reporting the Occupation. The other socialite replied, I came in Narulas plane. The DSC Group, managed by the Narulas, is the chief sponsor of the festival.
By Sunday, every snoop reporter in the festival was trying to confirm if Narula actually had a 12-seater private jet and, if yes, was it constantly shuttling between Delhi and Jaipur, airlifting Dr Naresh Trehan, Rajiv Sethi and other Page-3 high priests.
Money never flowed like this for books before. In the 80s, book launches didnt exist in Delhi. In the 90s, a generous publisher could organise a high tea and a dull panel talk at the India International Center. The scene turned around in the latter half of the past decade when the launches became bigger, glitzier and PR-driven, with the Page-3 reporters being e-mailed a list of celeb invitees in advance. It was no longer about the books but about cocktails, canaps and the chance to rub shoulders with the likes of Malini Ramani, or her mother. The publicity director of Random House India once told me, To ensure a hit, a launch must be celeb-filled.
So what if the celebs hadnt come to Jaipur for books? They had a good time, and so did many others who were there not to buy a Harry Potter but to get their books signed by Ruskin Bond. True, the pop talk by the Sex & the Citys Candice Bushnell was a full house, but so was the story reading by Coetzee. Reading isnt dead, its just got a little sexed-up.
At midnight during the Writers Ball on the last night of the Jaipur festival, the writers, the publishing house editors, the Page-3 types, the second-grade Rajmatas, the local leches, and the junior journos were eating, drinking and swaying to live Sufi music against a backdrop of the stunning Amer fort. Pointing at the illuminated ramparts of the fort, novelist Vikram Seth joked, Look, the organisers created this prop just for us. Perfect.
Mayank Austen Soofi lives in a library. He has one website (The Delhi Walla) and four blogs. The website address: thedelhiwalla.com. The blogs: Pakistan Paindabad, Ruined By Reading, Reading Arundhati Roy and Mayank Austen Soofi Photos.
