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, Alexander McCall Smith, Raghu Rai, Girish Karnad, Tony Wheeler, Prasoon Joshi and many many more.

In festivals such as this one, it is hard to make a real conversation with any one person. The inability to interact with every interesting visitor was frustrating. But there were compensations. Free wine. Good food. Lot of sex. Sucking up to celebrities you could have only dreamed of meeting. Making a three-dimensional measure of the people you regularly buy from Khan Market bookstores. And finding out which author is a nice person, and which one is… well, a bastard.

Here are the links to what The Delhi Walla saw in Jaipur:

Jaipur Diary – The Final Fifth Day

Jaipur Diary – The Engaging Fourth Day

Jaipur Diary – The Disappointing Third Day

Jaipur Diary – The Intense Second Day

Jaipur Diary – The Spectacular First Day

Jaipur Diary – The Early Birds

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

Sense of the place, Jaipur Literature Festival

I, me notepad, my camera (picture by Priya Dhawan)