 www.indiawrites.org |
|
||
| Search | |||
|
All set for Jaipur Literary Fest
Best-selling novelist Ian McEwan, known for his cerebral, tightly plotted novel bristling with dark wit, and the majestically erudite Gore Vidal are some of the iconic names who will be making their India journeys at the literary jamboree at the opulent Diggi Palace in Jaipur. Pakistani novelists Kamila Shamsie and Moni Mohsin are also set to be a big draw at the literary fest with Pakistan never slipping away from international news headlines. Writers, translators and publishers from across the Indian subcontinent like U.R Ananthamurthy, Urvashi Butalia, Neeta Gupta, Mahesh Dattani, Namita Gokhale, Ira Pande, Gopichand Narang, MT Vasudevan Nair, Udaya Narayan, Arjun Dev Charan are also going to be present at the week-long literary soiree. "India has such a culture of elitism, but Jaipur is unique because every event is free. Any student can just come and chat with Gore Vidal," says novelist and Indophile William Dalrymple, who is also a co-director of the festival along with writer Namita Gokhale. The Literature Week will be flagged off with a conference on 'Translating Bharat: Language, Globalization and the Right to be Read' which is aimed at invigorating the indigenous publishing houses and positioning India as a hub of global publishing. "Translating Bharat is a brave venture in its attempt to try and knit the myriad hues and pluralities that add up to 'India that is Bharat," says Gokhale. Rushdie’s new novel
The novel follows the tale of a woman trying to command her own destiny in man's world, the publisher Random House said in a terse note while announcing the publication of the novel in June this year. "I feel very nervous talking about unfinished works. I am writing a historical novel set in the 16th century India and Italy and a comparative study of the thought process of the book of 'Babarnama' and the works of Macaulay,' Rushdie, the king of exiles who has made magic realism his preferred habitat, said last year. Bombay-born Rushdie, knighted last year by the British Queen, is best known for his controversial novel 'The Satanic Verses' (1988), which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nearly a decade. Currently a 'Writer in Residence' at Emory University in Atlanta, US, Rushdie is in the middle of a divorce from his fourth wife, Indian American actress and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi. The author, who has known imaginary homelands and felt the burden of multiple identities intensely in his decades-long writing career, was hogging tabloid headlines for dating Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher. Rushdie has also put in a cameo appearance in the film 'Bridget Jones's Diary' (2001), and now will be seen in a brief role of a gynaecologist-obstetrician in Helen Hunt's 'Then She Found Me' (2007). Writers defy bombs to rendezvous in Sri Lanka Ignoring the bombs going off in the vicinity, leading lights of English literature from across the globe are meeting in the quaint Dutch-built city of Galle in south Sri Lanka for a four-day bonanza of lectures, readings, panel discussions and book launches. About 600 participants, including 50 from overseas, converged on Galle last week as bombs ripped through a passenger bus and an army personnel carrier killing 28 people in the adjacent Moneragala district, marking the end of a six year truce between the government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels. Among the leading figures at Galle who were present this year were Gore Vidal, Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Simon Winchester, Shyam Selvadurai, Nuri Vittachi and Carl Muller. But the end of the ceasefire and the spread of hostilities to the generally placid south Sri Lanka in recent months have affected attendance. Initially, 2,000 writers and enthusiasts, including 150 from abroad, had written to say that they would like to attend, a festival official said. However, the Galle Literary Festival has come to stay because it has already made a mark internationally. 'The attendance and the quality of the programmes had been so good last year, that Harper's Magazine had immediately voted it the number one literary festival among six such festivals across the English speaking world,' said Libby Southwell, the festival director. In just one year, it had been placed alongside the Hay Festival in Columbia and the Wexford Book Festival in Ireland, observed Red Dot, a Sri Lankan travel agency with a British link that promotes the festival. This year, there would be 70 events including film shows and children's programmes. There is also an educational side to the festival, which is perhaps unique. One of the main aims of the Galle festival is to spread the English language among the rural and under-privileged children in Sri Lanka who have no access to it. The organizers had zeroed in on Galle because of its quaint and old world Dutch colonial atmosphere. The Galle fort, with the waves of the Indian Ocean lashing its southern ramparts, magically transports visitors to a typically Dutch-colonial outpost of the 17th and 18th centuries. Sri Lanka is no stranger to European litterateurs and artistes. Since Robert Knox's first work in 1681, the island has captivated the English-speaking world. Among those who had stepped on the island and admired its beauty were Mark Twain, Pablo Neruda, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and Anton Chekov. The renowned science writer, Arthur C. Clarke, has made it his home for the past half a century. French composer Georges Bizet's exotic 1863 opera 'The Pearl Fishers' was set in Sri Lanka, though Bizet himself had not visited the island ever. Coincidentally, a French troupe was in the island to perform the opera last week. The Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA) has sensed the potential of the Galle festival to attract tourists of a particular kind to Sri Lanka. Panchatantra inspires Virgin Comics series Move over Archies, Vishnu Sharma is here. Virgin Comics was launched in North America recently with a new comic book series inspired by India's ancient Panchatantra fables. 'Panchatantra: The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma' was launched in comic book stores, a press release said. 'With this series, we continue our mission of looking to India as a source of innovative creativity with a vault of stories that should be brought to the world,' said Sharad Devarajan, CEO and co-founder of Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation. In Virgin's new monthly magazine, a nefarious conglomerate is silencing the mythologies of yesterday. To fight it, the characters from the Panchatantra emerge from their story-world into modern India to recruit the living descendent of the man who originally created them - Vishnu Sharma. The descendent is a boy in Mumbai, also named Vishnu Sharma. In Vishnu, they find a teenager fond of ipods, cell phones, video games and modern entertainment - not exactly a champion of ancient stories they were hoping for. And the story takes off from there. "'Tall Tales' is a true allegory for what old cultures are facing while mass media prospers," commented Gotham Chopra, Virgin Comics chief creative officer. The comic book series is being written by fantasy and comic book writer, Samit Basu, whose credits include 'Devi' and 'The Gameworld Trilogy', and illustrated by Ashish Padlekar.
Comments |
|
Literati, illuminati, glitterati and chatterati are bracing to preen and strut at the third edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (Jan 21-27) in the colourful capital of India’s eastern state Rajasthan, known mostly for magnificent palaces and an unquenchable nostalgia for the Indian royalty. 
The long wait appears to be over. Salman Rushdie’s new novel, 'The Enchantress of Florence', a historical novel that flits back and forth between Renaissance Florence and the 16th century Mughal Empire in India, will be published this summer. 
I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold