Notes from the Jaipur Literature Festival.

[Text and pictures by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary

Tina Brown, one of America’s most influential editors, is in love with the Jaipur Literature Festival. “I’m addicted to it,” she said while talking to The Delhi Walla. It’s her second time in the festival. “Jaipur is seeing a most amazing explosion of literary talent. I heard the extraordinarily humane, brilliant, enjoyable Wole Soynika. To attract this kind of talent and to have them in one place is amazing. And look at the kind of democratic, funny, chaotic situation here. It’s very appealing.”

Ms Brown, who formerly edited magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, currently takes care of Daily Beast, a news website she founded in 2008. “Daily Beast was the name of a newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop which I took as a literary reference that few of us understand,” she joked. “For those who don’t, it sounds kind of feral. It’s slightly bitchy. It’s a news-site that has a lot of vigor and animal spirits in it. We will eventually start a Daily Beast with India content too though it may take a couple of years.”

Ms Brown is so absorbed with her latest project that even as she attended author sessions and networked with people, she could not resist from frequently tapping onto her Blackberry, sending story ideas for her news-site. She also put on hold an ambitious biography she was doing on Hillary Clinton.

However, Ms Brown, author of a bestselling biography on Princess Diana, is considering writing on Congress President Sonia Gandhi. “When I first came to India in 2006, I thought to myself why there was no amazing book on her especially when she has led such a fascinating life,” she said. “The book’s in my future plans though I might be considered arrogant for being someone who is not an Indian to do a Sonia Gandhi biography.”

The Daily Beast‘s editor-in-chief may pick a cue from a British author whose India book she greatly enjoyed. “Yes, that’s true,” she said referring to Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer. “Tunzelmann is not Indian but she wrote a fabulous book on the Partition. It was a damn good story with excellent history where I also get the juicy relationship between Nehru and Edwina.”

Ms Brown, whose favorite Indian authors are Salman Rushdie, Suketua Mehta and Amitava Kumar, is presently reading Jacqueline Novogratz’s The Blue Sweater on her newly-acquired kindle (the e-Book). Excited about the new media technologies, she said, “Twitter is an art form. It’s great for someone as witty as the English writer Stephen Fry who would be like as if Oscar Wilde is tweeting. What I don’t like about tweets is when people say things about their private lives such as, ‘I’m now going to have sandwich’.”

Before arriving in Jaipur, Ms Brown spent four days in Delhi. “I love that city. Delhiites are passionate about intellectual issues, about ideas, about books. I was amazed that Delhi’s dinner party stuff was such a great form of debate.”

Click here to reach the complete compilation of the Jaipur Diary

Ms Brown

Ms Brown

Ms Brown