Jaipur literature fest has an emphatic start

The opening day of the sixth edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival was a shining testimony to the ever-increasing clout of an event that celebrates the printed word like almost no one else does.

The keynote address of Sheldon Pollock began the day on a bleak note as he informed the gathering that many languages are on the wane. Equilibrium was restored with OrhanPamuk’s rousing conversation with Chandrahas Choudhury. Pamuk was his eloquent self on a myriad of topics ranging from his unfulfilled dream of being a painter to how “the human heart is same everywhere and human life is different”.

Pamuk said his book My Name is Red is an ode to the illustrious Turkish culture, a turning point in his notions of culture which was previously built around Western thoughts. He put a damning question before the audience: “If you lose your culture, what is left of you?”

The next session that was equally stimulating was The Emperor of All Maladies, the book on cancer written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, who was joined by writer Katherine Russell Rich and Kaveri Nambisan. While Mukherjee gave a dramatic thrust to an already dramatic disease with his eye-watering details spanning four thousand years, Katherine spoke about her ongoing battle with the debilitating disease which was documented in her book, The Red Devil.

After lunch, Gurcharan Das was found discussing the recent financial Waterloo that the world saw with Liaquat Ahamed, an appropriate choice considering his Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World won the Pulitzer Prize for History. The duo humanised investment bankers and in a remarkable way ended up skewering both the bankers’ and the public’s appetite for easy credit.

Some more myths were demolished when Jon Halliday and Jung Chang spoke about the world-famous rubric: Mao Zedong. It was an illuminating history lesson for the gasping audience, especially when they were informed about his amazing indifference to human life with the blood of 70 million people on his hands.

The evening ended on a helium high with Junot Diaz’s entertaining and incisive insights into how he won a Pultizer, starting from a life in a colony next to a landfill in New Jersey.