Notes from the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] The Delhi Walla attended the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, 2010. The five days were sunny and intense. There were singers, actors, ambassadors, college students, tourists, hippies, aspiring writers, book lovers, socialites, politicians, free-loaders, journalists, and more than 200 authors and speakers such as Asma Jahangir, Claire Tomalin, Wole Soyinka, Romesh Gunesekera, Hanif Qureshi, Gulzar, Roberto Calasso, Roddy Doyle, Vikram Chandra, Ashok Vajpeyi, Niall Ferguson, Saleema Hashmi, Anne Applebaum, Ali Sethi, Tenzing Tsundue, Amit Choudhury, William Dalrymple, Sadia Shepherd, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geoff Dyer, Javed Akhtar, Tina Brown, Michael Frayn, Shobhaa De, Krishna Sobti, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Steve Coll, Stephen Frears, Chetan Bhagat, Lawrence Wright, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk,

Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival. [Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi] Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary His language sits lightly on his shoulders. As one of the few Hindi writers in the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, Delhi-based poet and cultural critic Ashok Vajpeyi gently rebuffed a few men who came complaining that the festival has largely ignored the national language. “But I’m not feeling ignored,” the longhaired poet said. “If others feel that way, they must better orgnaise a festival of such scale than crib about it.” Pointing out at the surrounding crowd of foreigners, the former vice-chancellor of the Indira Gandhi International Hindi University said, “You don’t see many Hindi lovers here because Hindi speaking