Consider my first invitation to moderate a panel for the Hong Kong Literary Festival in March 2003. The festival was held amid reports from southern China of a new, often deadly, virus. Within a couple of weeks of the festival, Hong Kong itself was reeling from the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. One of the authors who pulled out was an obscure Turkish writer on the panel I was moderating. On the same panel was a British writer whose work had been part of what is referred to as AIDS denialism in the 1990s. A series of articles for The Sunday Times, of which Neville Hodgkinson was the science editor, had argued that the AIDS epidemic in Africa was a myth and that antiviral treatments were ineffective. Staring at what remained of the lineup the evening before, I wondered whether the panel was an elaborate prank. But the grim reality the next morning was worse than I had catastrophised.
My disastrous debut in Hong Kong has been followed by other mishaps at literary festivals from Beijing to Boulder. In Beijing, a taxi driver drove off with my suitcase. This run of bad luck continued at the Galle Literary Festival (GLF) in February, which was so shambolically organised it sometimes felt as if it were fiction: Except that the unsuitable, out-of-the-way accommodation without breakfast for speakers and to erratic transport options that arrived too early or too late and frequent bungling was sometimes near unimaginable. Minutes before an interview I was doing in Galle with Lakshman Joseph-de Saram, the founder and artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Colombo on 8 February, I discovered there was no seating organised for the audience and the speakers, and not even microphones.
A JINX IN THE MIX
I have grandiosely come to believe I am the jinx that contributes to such fiascos, akin to Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the narrator who sees events in his life as contributing to wrong turns in newly independent India. My reel of mishaps includes Arvind Subramanian, then chief economic adviser to the government of India, cancelling a couple of hours before the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) session on the Indian economy I was moderating a decade ago because his flight was delayed by Delhi’s predictably unpredictable January fog. This meant I made my way to a stage that morning before more than 10,000 people, having just torn up my questions and improvised a new set around N.R. Narayana Murthy and the founding of Infosys in an India before the reforms of 1991.
But for every setback at a literary event, there are often heroes. At Galle, they were the angelic young volunteers. In Jaipur, I had the staunch encouragement delivered via wry wisecracks of JLF’s co-founder Sanjoy Roy.
Back in Hong Kong two decades ago, I decided the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin would save the day. I had long admired her courage, and her novel Lajja, which examines how religious fanaticism corrodes a society. The controversy around the book resulted in her having to seek exile in Sweden after militant Islamists threatened to kill her.
On my way to the opening dinner the night before my panel, I decided that the only way to salvage the discussion was to centre it around Nasrin. To avoid having to introduce Hodgkinson, whose Sunday Times articles had been critiqued by the scientific journal Nature in a 1993 editorial as “seriously mistaken, and probably disastrous,” I thought I would have the two panellists introduce themselves and then put most of the questions to Nasrin. But that evening, Nasrin appeared to take as a personal affront that I did not speak Bengali despite growing up in Kolkata, because I had gone to boarding school in north India. She was completely unsympathetic to the problems of the session ahead.
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The next morning, the discussion was as chaotic as anything I have witnessed. Noticing that the Life of Pi author Yann Martel was in the audience, I opened the Q-and-A early to use him as an additional panellist. He argued in favour of believing in religion, a counterpoint to Nasrin’s denunciation of organised religion as responsible for patriarchy and many of society’s ills. At the end, an American woman attendee pulled me aside. “You know, by allowing that author all those questions,” she said indicating Martel, “you just participated in what this panel was all about: the oppression of women by men.” The discussion was, in fact, titled “Writing for Change”.
WHEN STORIES COME ALIVE
I sometimes wonder why I keep going back. The truth is there is something thrilling about seeing hundreds, and on occasion thousands, of people, raptly listening to authors speak about their books or to historians taking them back a couple of millennia. It was hard not to be moved by my first time at JLF while listening to a scholar of Pali from Sri Lanka reading from the Therigatha, poems by Buddhist nuns in India 2,000 years ago that discuss subjects as disparate as Brahmanical privilege and the ageing female body in terms so blunt that they would seem courageous if a woman did so in similar terms in 21st century India.
At the JLF satellite event in Boulder, Colorado, a decade ago, the author Anchee Min practically re-enacted on stage the horrors of being a Maoist Red Guard sent to the countryside. Her mother’s severe scolding of Min for betraying her favourite teacher during China’s Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 was haunting because Min tells stories so vividly that they exist in a kind of present continuous tense. In more light-hearted vein, Min spoke of a lesbian affair with her unit’s commandant. She even demonstrated how she half-stood, half-squatted over open pit latrines in the countryside while swatting mosquitoes away from her exposed buttocks and legs. With such an inspired raconteur, I was reduced to a mostly giggling bystander on stage.
This year I was invited to JLF, but the email went to a defunct email address. I had already bought my plane ticket to attend the Galle Lit Fest before the mix-up could be rectified.
Despite my being a walking Rubik’s Cube of undesirable public speaking outcomes, the invitations to lit fests come in now and then. This year I was invited to JLF, but the email went to a defunct email address. I had already bought my plane ticket to attend the Galle Lit Fest before the mix-up could be rectified. My first event as an interviewer at the swanky Aman hotel in Galle had me wishing things had been the other way round. After fruitless calls to the GLF organisers and almost no help from the hotel, we got the conversation underway after volunteers heroically dragged chairs and poolside sunbeds to create a semblance of audience seating. This event, expensively ticketed and billed as cocktails with a Q-and-A, featured few cocktails and no canapes. Not even a can of Coke seemed available, the request of Joseph-de Saram, thirsty after performing in the un-airconditioned 18th-century church next door.
As an audience member at Galle, my experience was different: I attended animated discussions, including those by the gifted Sri Lankan writers V.V. Ganeshananthan and Radhika Hettiarachchi . But, on the sidelines, I heard a discordant soundtrack of complaints about the accommodation provided to authors and speakers and organisational blunders worthy of a remake of a South Asian Fawlty Towers.
Ahead of the final event I moderated in Galle, a lunch with the Hong Kong-based food writer Susan Jung, the hotel hosting it pulled out two days before. This was the result of another organisational miscommunication so epic it would require a novella to recount the details. Jung and I arrived early, but most of the attendees showed up at least half an hour late—because they hadn’t been informed the venue had changed. During lunch, an electricity blackout in many parts of Sri Lanka caused by a single monkey, presumably with the strength of Hanuman, meant we had to occasionally shout over the restaurant generator.
But Jung has an extraordinary breadth of knowledge about food and restaurants across Asia and the audience’s questions and observations were charming and engaging. In its triumph of intelligent, convivial conversation despite adverse conditions, the afternoon seemed emblematic of what makes lit fests special. Or perhaps I am beginning to enjoy the challenge.
Rahul Jacob is a former travel, food and drink editor of Financial Times, London and was its Hong Kong bureau chief. He is a columnist for Mint.
