The Daily Beast has this interesting article on their site about the Jaipur Literary Festival. Excerpt below:
"Yet those crowds were also intently focused on the hour-long panels in a way that any attendee of gabfests whose pulsating heart is normally the cocktail lounge would find astonishing. Events with sincere titles like "Why Books Matter" and "Reporting the Occupation" drew hundreds of rapt listeners. Audience members could ask earnest, unselfconscious questions like whether e-books were real books without blushing. South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee held an audience of over 1,000 people spellbound as he a read an entire short story, without a single cell phone trilling."
I know literary festivals are fodder for the fussy literary minds that work on novels, short stories, poems, plays, etc. in the loneliness of attics and dungeons with only their unwilling muses for company. (My muse often beckons me to the television, or my beautiful terrace hideout where I can lose myself in the many-layered V.S.Naipaul's novel "The Mimic Men.") Or, should I have been at the Jaipur Literary Festival instead, braving the cold, unpublished (sigh!), ignored, subdued, maligned? Better to rein in hell of my attic (yes, that's my writing space at home) than bow down to the literary glitterati in the exotic town of the Rajput kings of yore.
If I get published (that's a big "if"), only then will I go to Jaipur Literary Festival. Not otherwise. So, complete the editing for God's sake.
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