HLF Part 2

A festival of people and literature

If Mahesh Rangarajan, the environmental historian, was brilliant in his discourse on Nature and Nation, the anchor Aloka Parasher-Sen was a knowledgeable facilitator. The session left me, an ignoramus on the subject, thirsting for more, proving quite expensive as I bought every book by Mahesh Rangarajan available at the HLF bookstall.

The panel on Free Speech and Censorship was made memorable by Nayantara Sahgal’s gentle and supportive ways with the firebrand Maharashtrian Dalit writer Urmila Pawar, who was initially quite diffident about her lack of English. In this session and a later one, Pawar spoke of how all Dalit writing started out swearing angrily at God. She was not only the first Dalit woman writer from her part of the world , she was the first feminist author as well.

That evening I met my old friend George Abraham, blind, and one of the best communicators I have known,  in the hotel lobby. With him was Shakila Maharaj, a South African, also blind and a communicator. Though ready to drop at the end of a long day, I decided to wait up for George for a cup of coffe at the restaurant after he returned from his visit to a friend. George, a resident of Delhi,  and I go back a long way—since 2000 in fact, when he came to Chennai to organize the cricket  World Cup for the Blind and I interviewed him for the city portal Chennai Online. When we met around 11pm, it was well worth the wait, for George had stories to tell, stories of his exciting media ventures. He even produced a teleserial, Nazar ya Nazariya, stressing the need to empower the physically challenged. His Score Foundation helps people with disability and he is a proud man who has made light of his own disability, caused in childhood by an attack of meningitis.

George’s friend Shakila is a South African of Indian origin who lives in Durban, and speaks with an Irish accent, thanks to her early years in Ireland. Her husband Maharaj defied parental disapproval to marry her despite her disability. Shakila has had a successful career in the fashion business and now does audio descriptions for films so that the blind can enjoy them in the theatre. She has also written a film script, a comedy with three blind men and their loves, with a dash of mystery thrown into it.

If meeting George after a long gap was thrilling, with Shakila, it was instant friendship. It felt great to be accepted with total trust by someone you have just met. The three of us really hit it off.

George’s panel Through the Lens’s Eye had another member, Partho Bhowmick, who incredibly teaches the visually impaired photography. The panel was moderated by
L Subramani, a blind journalist who guided the conversation expertly, bringing out the best in each panellist. When I asked a question during Q&A time, Subramani stunned me—and the audience—by declaring that he once worked under me and that he owed much of his success to me! I, of course, remembered that he had been a sports correspondent reporting to me at Chennai Online. I was not only embarrassed but moved to tears as Subramani dwelt on my sterling but entirely imaginary qualities. I accosted him immediately after the discussion, and said, “Why did you do what you did? You know I never had a kind word for you when we worked together. I was always pulling you up for some lapse or other, even accusing you of laziness.´ “That is what you did for me sir,” Subramani replied. “You made me an honest, hard working journalist not taking advantage of my disability.”

Through the Lens’s Eye was accompanied by a delightful side show orchestrated by the lovely Anju Khemani—who runs the organization Drama for the Deaf—and a number of deaf members of her theatrical troupe, for whose benefit she was signing furiously throughout the session.

The next afternoon, Shakila and Partha Bhowmick were in conversation with Anju Khemani. Both explained their work most interestingly to  a most attentive audience.


I normally do not ask questions at seminars and panel discussions, rather afraid of making a fool of myself, but this time I could not resist the temptation, only I was a bit late off the starting block. Anju said, “We are already running late, but I will allow this one question from a special guest, who took a special interest in a blind employee. In fact, I am going to invite Mr Ramnarayan to HLF again next year.”

It was all rather heady, not at all what I had expected at HLF. Little did I realise, though, that more pleasant surprises were in store on the morrow.

A festival of people and literature

Part I

The Hyderabad Literary Festival has been the undoubted highlight of 2016 so far for me, yet I have taken over two months since my return from the city to post this note. The explanation is simple: I plunged into work, which has included at least three major events I was involved in. This is the first breather I have had in a long while.

It was a memorable experience, even if my own panel discussion, ostensibly centred around my book Third Man was a bit of a damp squib. I’ll come to that later, after I try to recapitulate my many enjoyable moments between 7^th and 10^th January, especially the wonderful interactions with other participants famous and not so famous.

My discovery of the festival was the delightful Nayantara Sahgal, gentle, vulnerable and friendly, not at all like the firebrand I expected, especially after the way she has critiqued the Indira Gandhi family over the last few years, and her crime of returning the Sahitya Akademi award in protest against the fundamentalist violence unleashed against writers and thinkers in the recent past. Her speech at the opening ceremony on the 7^th was a well reasoned plea to all of us, especially writers, to beware of the rising tide of intolerance in the country and resist it with all our might.ESL Narasimhan, the governor of AP and Telangana, spoke like a leader of the Sangh parivar, lambasting Sahgal in words that can only be described as unchivalrous. Over the next few days Sahgal was to frequently tell us how scared she was of the general violence in the air, but how impelled to speak her mind nevertheless for the sake of all of us who wish to safeguard our freedom. Kiran Nagarkar, with Nayantara Sahgal my breakfast mate on a couple of occasions, echoed this fear of Sahgal during his talk at one of the sessions. The theatre and film actor Dr Mohan Agashe had a slightly different say in the matter: he demanded of artists that they deal with threats to freedom through subtlety and circumvention. Both Sahgal and Nagarkar had to deal with rabble rousers apparently planted in their sessions. Nagarkar fielded some of the bullets deftly by declaring his love of our epics, which however did not mean he had to support fundamentalist stances by our politicians and their less cultured allies.

Now to come to my own panel discussion on cricket writing, it became a session about my khadoos Mumbaiyya-Hyderabadi former teammate Vijay Mohan Raj—who came to the organisers’ rescue by filling in for the absent Vijay Lokapally, my would-be fellow panelist—decided the whole hour belonged to him and hogged the strike, not forgetting to deliver a homily on ethics to me and the audience. Poor anchor Harimohan Paruvu, who had worked hard to persuade the festival authorities to invite me as a delegate, was denied the strike for far too long to score. I think I made the best of a bad bargain. At least one member of the audience—Jonathan Gil Harris, distinguished author of The First Firangis—seemed to agree. 

The casualty was my book Third Man, which I was forced to wave frantically at the audience—some of them disappointed stragglers from the next tent where the actor Shriya Saran failed to turn up—to let them know I had actually written a book.

I was not unduly disappointed, because I thoroughly enjoyed the many brilliant lectures and interactions I attended and the wonderful warmth of everyone I met—the organizers, the audience and the delegates. (To be continued)