Science, Osama, and calls for fearless journalism
On the fourth day of the 11th edition, the Jaipur Literature Festival turned back to its roots — with sessions on the craft of novel writing, on the methods of investigative journalism, seabirds, music culture, botany, Egyptian queens, maritime policy, and rivers, tigers and Virginia Woolf.
Early in the day, Suki Kim and Michael Rezendes were in conversation with Charlie English. Kim is a South Korean journalist who went undercover in North Korea to report how the Pyongyang elite lived their lives and saw the world; Michael Rezendes is, of course, the reporter who worked on investigations of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church that were depicted in the movie Spotlight.
Multiple other sessions of interest were on early in the morning. The writers of two books on the search for Osama bin Laden and his life after 9/11 — Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott- Clark, writers of The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Flight and Peter Bergen, who wrote Manhunt: The Search for Osama bin Laden in 2012 — were in conversation with India’s former ambassador to Islamabad, T CAR ag ha van. Naturally, the subject of Pakistan’s complicity with bin Laden came up, though the panelists suggested incompetence was perhaps a more compelling explanation.
Meanwhile, historian Victor Sebestyen took the audience through recent discoveries and old truths about the life and career of Lenin, 100 years after the Russian Revolution. But, the crowds flocked to listen to S hob ha a De and V ir Sangh vi discuss the past, in a session called Those Were the Days; Sanghvi tried to push De into admitting her early potboilers, like Socialite Evenings, were wild ly unrealistic but De was willing to admit only to “slight exaggerations”.
Sanghvi was on stage again shortly thereafter, in an incarnation more familiar to younger festivalgoers: As a food writer. He moderated a session with Kota Neelima, Sarah Raven and Lathika George. Neelima has written one about prasad in Indian temples, Raven — a doctor — has written a book about healthy, vegetarian recipes. And, George has produced two masterful books about Kerala cuisine — specifically of her own Syrian Christian community, which she said she began to understand better through the recipes.
At lunchtime, Shashi Tharoor, hardest-working speaker at the festival, took the stage to discuss his past bestseller, Inglorious Empire. This discussion, however, was in Hindi; the MP from T hi ru van ant ha pu ram, known for his use of the English language, performed creditably as he went again through his thesis about perfidious English colonisers and the “age of darkness” they brought to India.
It seemed likely at the fourth day of the festival that, among younger attendees, there were as many girls as boys — and perhaps more. Unusual in an Indian public space, this may have been because JLF is very clearly a safe space, with a very visible police presence. Best-selling author Chetan Bhagat — who dashed in and out of the festival arena over the weekend like a movie star, surrounded by private security, police, and adoring fans — tweeted his thanks to the Jaipur police, saying they were “doing an excellent job at the crowded ZEE JLF, quietly providing security at every corner of the fest”.
The strong female presence added an additional savour to a session on Women on Science that closed the day, with the British journalist and author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, Angela Saini, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar- Shaw and Namita Bhandare. Mazumdar-Shaw was acerbic about the ladder of success in science, pointing out that while near equal numbers of men and women enter scientific and technical fields, men seemed to find it easier to rise to the top of a peer-reviewed profession in which most of reviewers and others in authority were male.
Notably, the organisers had to shift around sessions to fill a hole created by the absence of censor board chief Prasoon Joshi, who kept away because of threats from violent Rajput outfits, incensed by his decision to clear the movie Padmaavat. In one of the sessions that replaced Joshi’s, comedian Mallika Dua said it was unfortunate that she had to be on stage at all. The theme of threats and violence was taken up at other points; De had already compared the current Delhi media negatively to those who resisted the Emergency. For many, the highlight of the day was institution of an award by writers’ organisation PEN for courageous reporting, in memory of murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh.