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Business News/ Opinion / Blogs/  JLF 2015 | Rohan Murty’s visa issues
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JLF 2015 | Rohan Murty’s visa issues

Rohan Murty's interest lies in computer programming and coding, the visa officials declared that they needed to do a background check on him first

Rohan Murty at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/ MintPremium
Rohan Murty at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/ Mint

Even as the importance of the translation project, the Murty Classical Library, started as a result of a $5.2 million endowment by Rohan Murty, Harvard scholar and son of Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy, and the perseverance of Sanskrit scholar Professor Sheldon Pollock, got discussed at the lit fest, an aside about Murty junior, as overheard during a conversation between him and Pollock in Delhi.

Murty, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, had taken a break to work with his father at Infosys. He is now very much ready to return to Harvard. Except he is facing visa problems. And since his interest lies in computer programming and coding, the visa officials declared that they needed to do a background check on him first.

• • • • • • •

Modi must read riot act to Hindutva elements, says Shashi Tharoor

In an afternoon session titled India Shastra, Shashi Tharoor took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his rhetoric of India and its youth being the engine of change. “We need to look at education as a national security issue. Otherwise we will be creating unemployable youth."

Speaking of Hindutva elements getting increasingly vocal, he said, “they have a nativist agenda and resent foreigners and the idea of foreign investment". “Modi must read them the riot act, and show his disapproval and not be silent as he has done till now. Otherwise the promise of jobs and development that he made to the youth will not be fulfilled and the Congress will win the next elections."

Modi, he said, needs to understand the potential damage of aggravated atmosphere in the country in attracting foreign investors from Europe and the Arab nations. “we’ve hit rock bottom. This is our last chance to convince people of our potential. If they don’t get it right, they’re not coming back," he said to much applause.

• • • • • • •

1:17pm

A short story by H.S. Narula

With so many exemplary writers speaking on their work, inspirations, and process of writing at the Jaipur Literature Festival, it is to be expected that many in the audience would be inspired to pick up the pen themselves. So why not H.S.Narula, chairman of the global infrastructure company DSC which sponsors the 50,000 dollar prize for south Asian literature. He took the opportunity offered by the DSC prize ceremony at the festival on Thursday to express himself. So here’s a short story about Narula and the JLF’s relationship and the DSC prize’s departure from the festival from next year. In his words.

“Eight years ago, Namita Gokhale approached me and sought my help with the difficult birth of a child called JLF. She told me that it needs help, may even be stillborn. She asked me to come in to facilitate the birth of JLF. So I agreed to sponsor it. And then I decided to give it a creative toy as well. So was born the DSC prize. I have nursed it over the years and the child has grown. Today the nurse feels that the nurse doesn’t need to overmother the child. The child is now a mother herself."

• • • • • • •

5:08pm

‘Mujhe Jeene Do’: A session with Waheeda Rehman

The session with Waheeda Rehman this afternoon, “Mujhe Jeene Do", was a clear indication of how film obsessed we are as a people. Seats were all taken, and those too wet to sit on because of the rain were used to gain a better view of the legendary actress. Others not so lucky were still content to be standing in the drizzle and just listening to her voice. And anecdotes she had plenty to share during her conversation with writer and translator Arshia Sattar.

Rehman, who has worked with most of the great directors of her time, spoke specifically of the different styles of Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray. Dutt was such a perfectionist, she recalls, that he would never ever be satisfied with any shot, not even his own. “Yeh silsila (of retakes after retakes) toh chalta rehta tha. Usko khush karna bahut mushkil tha."

In contrast, she says, Ray was so clear in his mind about what he wanted in the shot. Since he also used to be involved in editing his films, he would say that he knew exactly how much of a shot to keep, and didn’t care to waste his energy. “He also used to say that Bengali films were made on low budgets and he couldn’t afford to waste reels," says Rehman.

As for Dutt, she recalls that once she was at home since she didn’t have a shoot. A production person called her up to say that she just had to arrive on set to see something. This was a shot with Guru Dutt and Mala Sinha. She was told to sit quietly and watch as the veterans did their retakes. There were 76 takes before Dutt said Ok to the shot, laughed Rehman.

Rehman also recalled that when she first joined the film world, there was intense pressure on her to change her name. The name that we know so well and associate with grace and elegance was then considered to have “no glamour, no sex appeal", she says. “Lekin meri akad bahut thi," says the soft spoken actress. She refused to change the name her parents had given her and stood her ground till the producers succumbed. She was 16 then.

Rehman was to show the same determination and clear mindedness when she was offered her role in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and she accepted it despite Guru Dutt’s advice. Initially Rehman had naturally assumed that “bibi ka role main hi karoongi." But Guru Dutt told her that she didn’t fit the role. “I thought that he didn’t think I had reached maturity as an actress yet," she says. But Dutt only thought that Rehman looked too much like a schoolgirl – “post pack up I used to rush out of the sets like a schoolgirl getting out of school"— and wouldn’t fit into the character. It was eventually played by Meena Kumari. Dutt certainly didn’t want her to take on the role of Jaba since she had by now become a star and he felt playing a second lead would work against her. But she did “because the role was so interesting and I didn’t have a problem with playing a second role".

An actress who doesn’t believe in hamming and “keeping things natural", Rehman recounts the difference between stars of her generation and the younger ones with the story of her make up mirror. It was so tiny, she remembers, that Yash Chopra once even asked her how she did her make up. First one eye peeking into the mirror, then the other, was her reply. By contrast was Rishi Kapoor’s mirror, she laughs, so big that he needed someone to hold it up so he could see his entire profile.

• • • • • • •

Day 2, 12:46pm

Rains play dampener on the second day

The rains have played a dampener on the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It has been pouring since last night and a steady drizzle has kept through. Since most of the sessions were planned to take place in outdoor areas, with thin cloth covering that would keep at most the sun out of the face, the organizers are in a tizzy reorganizing the discussions. While a session with Lauren Child in the early part of the day got cancelled, most of the others have now been given half an hour slots instead of a full hour in the two indoor areas that exist— the durbar hall and the baithak. Attendance has obviously dropped since yesterday but most of those who have arrived from other cities have been stoutly making their way from session to session nonetheless.

Talk is that the weather is predicted to be as wet over the next few days. Let us just hope that this is not what this years edition gets known for.

• • • • • • •

10:16pm

Eimear McBride on feeling like a failure for nine years

Eimear McBride’s debut novel, “A Girl is a Half-formed Thing", won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, and then the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2014. It also won her the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2013, Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2014, Desmond Elliott Prize 2014, and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2014. What could be more successful than that, right? Wrong.

For nine years the Irish novelist had to “carry the weight of failure". For nine years, all she received from publishers were rejection slips. She says that she wrote the book in six months (“I didn’t do anything else for six months"), but it was nine years before it was read. Not to count her husband and various writer friends, of course, “who were supportive and enthusiastic – but that was their job," she laughs. While a few didn’t like it, others felt their marketing team wouldn’t be able to sell it, she says.

Ironical then that she was part of a session, along with Man Booker awardee Eleanor Catton, titled “Early Triumphs". Catton, on the other hand, says that she was extraordinarily lucky to be shielded from such market-driven concerns and allowed to write what she wanted.

“It’s hard to feel like a writer when you are not published," she says of the experience, adding that it made her think very hard about what she wanted to do. In the end she decided that whether or not she was published, she was a writer and would still write.

Asked whether she’d considered self-publishing her novel, McBride replies that since this was in the mid-2000s, it was not an option since it was considered a taboo if a writer wanted to be taken seriously. In any case, she adds, “considering the nature of the book, she needed some stamp of approval. The Internet is full of crazy books. I still wouldn’t consider it (self-publishing)."

“A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing", finally published by Galley Beggar, is a novel written in a stream of consciousness style that takes plenty of liberties with the technical aspects of the language, and explores with particularly vicious honesty the complicated relationship of a girl with her family, with her brother who has brain cancer, her mother a devout Catholic, an uncle who sexually abused her. “I wanted to write a book of love, but not romantic love," says McBride.

Writing the book for six months, getting into the head of the girl, “the experience ruined me", she says. “My background is in acting, and the only way I could do it was by method acting, by talking my way out of it. It’s like being surrounded by a swarm of bees, and finding a way out."

• • • • • • •

3:51pm

Eleanor Catton: Reading is 90% of a writer’s job

A House for Mr Biswas was the book up for discussion at one of Wednesday’s sessions, but Man Booker Prize Winner of 2013, Eleanor Catton, says her big inspirations were children’s books. Catton’s mother “was the best thing for a mum to be", a children’s book librarian, allowing her to devour all the books in the library to her heart’s content. Catton admits that she continues to read children’s books all the way into adult life, and has an enormous respect for them.

Reading, she believes, is 90% of a writer’s job. Before she begins a book, the author of The Luminaries, says she herself reads and takes absurd amounts of notes, ending with a bank of knowledge. “An author needs to know enough of the subject to add to that experience." In support of her belief, Catton has also set aside a part of one of her award money for a grant to allow writers time to read. Before she could say further, her voice was drowned out by the sound of excited schoolchildren who’d just spotted their superstar. Stop yourself before you utter the word Naipaul. This was chef Vikas Khanna, in the area to launch his book Masterchef India Cookbook.

• • • • • • •

6:51am

The party began last night

It’s just inconvenient being in Delhi this week. With Republic Day round the corner, security is intense, and traffic all the more frustrating. In Jaipur, by contrast, there are few signs that this week may be different from any other. Let alone Republic Day, there was no indication that the city was hosting an international festival of literature with over 200 authors in attendance. The only cops in sight are the traffic police, occupied largely with forcing traffic tickets on to speeding bikers. Unfortunately for them, they are the most reliable direction-givers in a city where no one wants to admit that they don’t know the way.

And so we were pointed in the direction of the Taj Rambagh Palace last night, the venue for an author’s party to celebrate the start of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Plane loads of writers had been flown into the city just a few hours earlier, presumably to have them fresh and ready for the intense rounds of panel discussions in the following five days, but with Glenlivet supporting the festival, it’s to be seen how that plan unfolds.

Missing the “author community" experience at the Delhi airport was Nayantara Sahgal, who’d just about landed in the capital after attending the Hindu Lit for Life event in Chennai and refused a flight or a train, preferring instead the bumpy road from Delhi to Jaipur; unsurprisingly, the 87-year-old author excused herself from the Rambagh dinner.

Five years younger to her and very much present was V.S. Naipaul, who’d famously lashed out at Sahgal in a 2002 literary festival organised by the ICCR in Neemrana, professing an impatience for banal women writers. Seated in a wheelchair and flanked by festival co-founder Namita Gokhale, he even obligingly posed and smiled for a few people who wanted photographs taken with him even as the rest of the crowd turned their heads upwards to take in the firecrackers bursting in the sky above.

The night air grew warmer as the wine and whisky flowed and participants relaxed in each other’s company. Early to leave around 11pm were Girish Karnad, Mark Tully and C.S. Lakshmi, all three of whom will participate later on Wednesday in the launch of the Limca Book of Records 2015, which will focus on writing this time. While Karnad will speak on the reading habit, Tully, Lakshmi and Sahgal will be part of a discussion on whether the commerce of literature is killing good writing.

Some of the other highlights of Day 1 include:

* A key note on the poetic imagination: Speakers are Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri, Ashok Vajpayee and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

* A session by performance storyteller Cat Weatherill.

* Man Booker awardee Eleanor Catton and Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Eimear McBride speaking on early triumphs.

* Hanif Kureishi, Amit Chaudhuri, Paul Theroux on Naipaul’s book A House for Mr Biswas.

* A conversation with Wild Swans author Jung Chang on a newer book, A biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi.

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Published: 21 Jan 2015, 11:11 AM IST
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