The final day of the Bangalore Literature Festival matched the enthusiasm of the first, with eager visitors forgoing seats to listen to their favourite panellists — from authors discussing the city of Bengaluru to a crowd-magnet interaction between Shashi and Smita Tharoor.
Among the more popular sessions this Sunday were those involving book releases and interactions by Bengaluru-based authors. One of these was a conversation on ‘Bangalore Blues’, a collection of short stories set in the city, by author and filmmaker Kirtana Kumar.
She explained, “People are writing literature about cities like New York, Paris and Bombay but I wanted my own literature of Bangalore. I wanted literature that was as polyglot as I was and as polyglot as the cantonment Bangalore that I grew up in. I was very interested in that time because I thought the times provided for the development of very maverick characters, characters who are very diverse and polyglot in their language, in their beliefs, in their religion. This was facilitated by the way the Bangalore cantonment was.”
Another session that drew considerable attention was Shashi Tharoor’s official release of the book ‘The Great Bangalore Morph: From Kempegowda to Covid’ by noted Bangalore artist Paul Fernandes and Chicku Jayadeva, along with a reading of a part of the foreword by Tharoor.
A fresh biographical release by a Bangalore-based author was ‘Jagadish Chandra Bose – The Reluctant Physicist’ by Sudipto Das. With his previous three works being fiction, this was his first foray into biographical non-fiction.
Das, an engineer, said, “Bose has almost been forgotten outside the academic world. Even a lot of Bengalis don’t know about him anymore. But his contribution to practical science and innovation is immense. Any technical paper on 5G will mention him.”
Referring to the reason for the book’s title, Das explained that despite the fact that his work in physics was best known (such as his collaboration with Einstein), his true passion for many years had been in the field of botany.
Perhaps the most popular session of the day was ‘The Tharoors Confabulate’, a discussion featuring Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor and his younger sister, businesswoman and corporate trainer Smita Tharoor, on topics from Shashi Tharoor’s experience as a writer, to word games along the lines of Wordle that the siblings’ father Chandran would challenge them with on long drives.
Shashi Tharoor also shared a piece of practical advice for aspiring writers at the session. He said, “The way you write should be as instinctive and natural as the way you speak or think. To my mind, it’s got to be the way that I am thinking. So, my advice to people is: write or learn to write by writing. Nowadays you don’t even need a publisher. Do a blog and put it on the internet, send links to your friends and ask them to be honest with you.”
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 04-12-2023 at 20:48 IST
