Sunil Sethi: Abu Dhabi - The Gulf's central arena

Twenty years ago, the Abu Dhabi book fair was a disorganised books souk, but then, 20 years ago, not all that much was going on in Abu Dhabi. This year, the book fair’s general manager, a brisk German, announced that it was now the largest book fair between Tehran and Seoul, and with 236,000 publishing professionals, 840 exhibitors and 63 countries participating, even bigger than Moscow’s. Ever since Kitab, as the festival is called, began operation as a joint venture between the Frankfurt book fair and the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage in 2007, it has been registering an annual growth of 25 per cent. And the growth is visible.

Last year, visitors were put up in hotels downtown about a 20 minutes run from the fairground. This year, a trendy new 200-odd-room hotel has come up at the site itself, complete with terrace gardens and rooftop bars overlooking the Gulf’s marinas. Together with the exhibition area, 20,000 sq metres of air-conditioned space set around a vast open air piazza, the place is a pulsating hive of activity. It makes Delhi’s shambolic international book fair, hosted at Pragati Maidan last month, look like a backward child.

A little learning is said to be a dangerous thing, but Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates which sits on 9 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and was once voted by Fortune magazine as the richest city on the planet, is putting some of its wealth to good use. Epic-scale events are held here and, since Dubai’s decline, it has emerged as the Gulf’s central showpiece arena. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, Rupert Murdoch and other luminaries were in attendance at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit earlier this month; there was an international sports event with Hollywood stars walking the red carpet; and Shah Rukh Khan chose Abu Dhabi for the worldwide premiere of My Name Is Khan. Late last year was the Abu Dhabi Art Fair, an event so exclusive that only a select list of auction house representatives, art galleries and big-ticket collectors were invited to ogle (and haggle) over prime pieces of Impressionist art, Alexander Calder mobiles and other treasures.

The six-day book fair, by contrast, is open to the public and caters to a wide range of interests, including 12,500 schoolchildren who poured in to revel in a large children’s section. Other than specialist sections (seminars on copyright law, subsidised trade between literary agents and authors and academic publishing), there are several well-established popular segments. Two interactive showpieces are the Kitab Sofa and Discussion Forum that present authors in interview with live audiences followed by book signings. Guests from the subcontinent this month included Bapsi Sidhwa, Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra and Tarun Tejpal, but the scene was stolen by noted Malayalam writer and filmmaker M T Vasudevan Nair. Hordes of the Gulf’s Malayali community came out to root for him and there were queues at the stall of DC Books, Kerala’s leading publisher and bookseller.

Another example of the carefully-honed events is the book fair’s wildly-successful show kitchen. This has live demos all day long by international chefs with cookbook displays and signings. The professional show kitchen — with video screens, a cameraperson with hand-held camera and cooks with hands-free mikes — is supplied by a leading German kitchen appliances firm and the event is managed out of Stockholm by a gourmand company that presents cookbook awards. Audiences are invited to learn recipes, buy cookbooks and gorge on delicacies that range from Moroccan to Mughal feasts.

But the Abu Dhabi book fair’s true raison d’etre is to promote authorship in the Arab world and in Arabic literature. Considering that the prizes for best fiction, works in translation and academic research start at over Rs 8 lakh a head, oil money is being well spent.