I will be talking about popular fiction at a panel discussion in Chennai during the Hindu Lit For Life event on the 17th. 

Place: Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Concert Hall
Time: 10:50 – 11:35 AM. 
Details here: http://thehindulfl.com/ 

And then later this month I will be giving a brief presentation at the TEDx event in Goa on the 24th.

Details here: http://www.tedxbitsgoa.com/2013/

Feel free to come over and chat, get Dorks signed, hand me hard cash or whatever. I’d be more than happy to mingle platonically.

Cool? Cool.

And so it was this morning. Our B&B, the best bed and breakfast in the whole wide world so far, is a brisk 40-minute walk away from the city centre. Most of those 40 minutes are spent along the banks of the river Cam. Though it does seem a little embarrassing to call the Cam a river. I’ve seen potholes in Thrissur that are wider, deeper, have more consistent fluid flow, and have a livelier water sports scene. 

But if the locals insist it is a river, who are we to disagree?

This morning the Cam was, as usual, fabulous. Swans and ducks and college rowing teams jostled for space on the Cam’s surface as your blogger and his missus and other pedestrians calmly walked by in the biting cold and glorious sunshine. (This is, without a doubt, the worst weather in the world to dress for. Every layer is one layer too much for this much sunshine. Every layer is one layer too little for the cold. Bloody nonsense.)

So we walked, occasionally stopping to watch the rowing teams piston by, and generally wondered how much it would cost to buy a little house in Cambridge. And then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, the smell of somebody burning some kind of wood wafted over on the back of a gust of wind, penetrated my nostrils, activated a vast array of nerve endings and smell receptors, all of which then relayed a burst of electrical signals into my brain.

Et, as the french say, voila. Suddenly, clear as crystal, I could see my grandmother hunched over the wood-burning stove in the kitchen of my old ancestral home in Kerala.

Smell is the WinZip of the brain. One moment somebody is burning something somewhere. The next moment you have a full 3D diorama in your head of something that happened years and years and years ago.

We don’t burn wood in our stoves back in Thrissur any more. We don’t have grandmother anymore either. But the memories are vivid. I can still smell the bits and pieces of dried coconut palm fronds and coconut shells fogging up our kitchen and sooting up the insides of our massive chimney. We cooked simple meals in those days. (We still do, mostly. You need a lot of wealth to wash away even the slightest run in with poverty.) But depending on where you ate your food it could taste completely differently. Eat in the kitchen and everything tasted smoky and sweet and, frankly, a little grainy. Things got better in the dining room. Take your plate outside to the courtyard and the tamarind in the fish curry and the coconut in the kadala curry began to slowly emerge from beneath the smokiness. 

There are other smells that mean much to me. The smell of the carpet in the lobby of my building in London is a powerful sensory marker. It tells me I am home. And that everything is ok. And that you no longer have to use strange toilets or eat strange breakfasts. The smell of carpets, though, is an ancient totem for me. The smell of carpets also remind me of my flat in Abu Dhabi. Of how we’d come back from the airport after annual vacation in Kerala, open the door, inhale the smell of carpets and… suddenly realise that it was time to go back to school, and read the Khaleej Times, and eat sausages from a plastic bag. It meant that you no longer woke up each morning to hear cows being milked and grandparents fighting and uncles battling with scooters and cousins carving wickets out of wooden sticks. It was a sad feeling. It was a happy feeling. And it was all because of the carpets.

Yes. Smells. Awesome things. I just thought I’d share. 

I am 50% sure this is a hoax comment. And 50% certain it is someone who has painstakingly translated their thoughts on the run from Tamil to English. I don’t care. It is so bloody funny.

Click to the page here. And search for the comment by Perumselva Pandiyan.

I reproduce it here in full. Enjoy.

***

Panicker saar: You are telling Pakistan is not having skin and India will bat out Pakistan skin and chase match for winning.

How India can chase Pakistan skin? Like that nonsense why you are telling public type of commentary? You are telling cricket commentary means you tell cricket commentary – why you are telling about skin and all? India also is not having skin because it is getting defeat in three times from Pakistan.

Also Tendulkar is Oozing, Balaji is Oozing and all India fellow is Oozing – bit Mohammed Kafi is not oozing because he is not brinjal eating fellow. But also I am putting open bet on you – you are having mustache means you take bet. I am telling starting for straight and putting bet: India will not win saar. If India win means I will wear komanam and run around your house and I will not keep mustache. If India is getting defeat means you except that Pakistan is super type of fellows and India name is in public toilet. Also please don’t keep mustache. Mustache is for male type of fellow. You are male type of fellow means you keep open bet.

Also Agarkar is useless only. Also Kumaran is best bowler for India why he is not getting chance? Also peoples are always telling that Aktha is putting 150 meter per second his balls, also Bert Lee is putting 150 meter per second in his balls. Kumara is bowling 200 meter per second in his balls. But Kumaran is not getting chance. Why you are not telling for Kumaran getting chance? Can you tell in open type of way? Are you seeing Kumaran’s balls in Ranji match and Test match in Australia? Even Steve Waugh [ Images ] is seeing Kumaran’s balls and getting afraid of his balls swinging and reverse cutting.

Kumaran is Tamilan and Dravidan man. He is not false Dravid like Dravid and he is also not false Tamilan like Balaji and all. Kumaran is clean Tamilian. Give Kumran chance also for showing reverse balls.

Yours Faithfully

Also Kumaran is original Tamilan with chest, mustache and all.

***

But I’d pestered the Penguin people for weeks and I suppose cracking open a box at Jaipur seemed ceremonial enough. The guys who ran the shop, the same guys who run the Full Circle outlet at Khan Market in New Delhi, promptly took a stack of fresh Dork copies and dumped them on the lowest rack of a bookshelf, next to Shoba De and Sidney Sheldon.

As the day progressed the stack receded farther and farther into the dark nether regions of the bookshelf while, in more prominent positions, books by Geoff Dyer and William Dalrymple literally vaporised by the stackfulls. Still I was most thrilled. Every few hours I’d pop in and check on status. And the Dork stack would cough and wheeze and splutter and shorten itself one comforting copy at a time.

Very quickly, however, I was engrossed in the festival itself. Sure, I spent hours agonising over what those early buyers thought of my book. Things were not helped by Samit Basu’s motivating quip one morning that he had started reading the book, but had fallen asleep after a few pages. (A terrible cameo awaits him in book three.)

Jitters apart, I was truly enjoying the festival. In many different ways.

Now when I went to Jaipur I had no idea who the organisers or founders of the event were. I knew Dalrymple was involved in some capacity. I had no idea what their ulterior motives were, what their political or ideological agenda were and whether they cared about other Indian languages. (I say ‘other’ because it is ludicrous to think English isn’t an Indian language.)

I also did not know what their criteria for inviting authors were. Was I jealous of some of the invitees? Of course. Did I want to be invited one day? Of course. I still do. The appreciation of your peers is highly valued in any profession, not least in a creative and particularly criticism-prone one like writing.

Also at no point was I thinking to myself “What does this festival achieve for the nation as a whole?”

When I was at Jaipur the only things playing on my mind were: Which are the good sessions? Which authors should I be listening to? As a young author coming to grips with this vocation, who should I talk to, what advice should I be asking for and what lessons did these fabulous writers have for me?

And my experience was absolutely fascinating. And very fulfilling. Lawrence Wright’s bag of tricks and tips for reporters I will never forget as long as my messenger bag includes an audio recorder. The session on travel writing was both amusing and informative.

A remarkable session on terrorism and the Middle East involving Wright and Steve Coll exposed me to nuance on a subject that is often analysed with staggering, stifling polarity. That session led me to buy and read several books.

I also met a few people at Jaipur who have remained friends and twitter-buddies since.

All in all, I had the time of my life.

I say all this because this year JLF has been the cynosure of attention for many reasons, most of them negative. There was that Rushdie imbroglio that overshadowed everything else. Then there were the readings of the Satanic Verses, the assassins, the quotable quotes, the outrage and, most distressing for me personally, the reams of punditry condemning the festival as pointless, irrelevant or a schmoozefest.

Most of that is perhaps true. But my point is: so what man?

Tell me this: what can possibly make a literary festival vital? At what point in a society’s evolution does a literary festival assume a position of critical importance? Which nation in the world can standup and say: “Look, we’ve solved all our critical problems. All our vital shortcomings have been alleviated. Now we start with our frivolous shortcomings. And top on that list is a thumping huge literary festival.”

I don’t think even one. Even Norway, with all that HDI and GDP, has to deal with insane gunmen and Indian parenting quirks.

In fact, when you think about it, literature and literary festivals are perhaps important precisely because they are not vital. They distance–some would even say elevate–us from the brutal and mundane that frustrate us in our daily lives. Why do you come home after work and see a rerun of Friends? Because you identify with the moral rectitude of Matt Le Blanc and Courtney Cox? Because you are 100% certain that the producers of the show don’t have some ulterior political motive in their scripts?

Who knows? More importantly, who cares?

Then why demand of literary festivals, organisers, participants or even audiences the morality, clarity of purpose, sanctity of intentions and social relevance that we demand of hardly anybody or anything else. And especially so of a privately organised literary event where the public is allowed to visit freely.

Can you spend the whole week schmoozing at Jaipur? Of course. Can you spend the whole week stalking celebrities or sucking up to the clique-ish publishing industry? Certainly. Can you spend the week in the midst of a few wonderful authors and artists enjoying discussions, debates and perspectives? Yes you can, even if the quality of sessions can be very uneven and often helmed by bizarre moderators. But hey, it is free and you can vote with your feet. Bad JLF this year? Don’t go next year.

Disagree with the mandates of the festival? Want to focus more on translated fiction, Marathi poetry or Malayalam travel writing? By all means organise your own festival. JLF does not have an exclusive national license on literary festivals.

If anything we need plenty more festivals all over the country. As any Chetan Bhagat event in a small town shows, there are readers everywhere in this country. And they love meeting and talking to authors. There are more languages, topics and issues than can be handled by a dozen large Indian festivals. But chances are that any such festival will be tinged by controversy. We are not a country famed for our ability to get along with each other. Or for our restraint when it comes to putting public figure on pedestals.

You are welcome to try to organise a literary festival that will condemn any kind of schmoozing, celebrity worship, low brow conversation, political partisanship, NRI fixations or ideological leanings. Feel free. But literary festivals can seldom be less polarising than literature itself.

However a lot of the analysis I see right now is saddening. It is akin to saying let us burn down cinema theatres because too many people watch crap movies.

No screens. No crap movies. No movies at all. Victory for good cinema?

Hardly.

***

p.s. No. I am not trying to get an invitation. Why would you think like that?
p.p.s. I am getting old.

This, of course, is nonsense. And I have the PowerPoint slides to prove it.

Hah.

But, to be honest, at least one veteran consultant has written to me about how much Dork has touched one of his/her raw nerves.

So imagine how much pain a spectacular new blog post on the  the New Yorker’s website will inflict on them. Titled Christopher Nolan’s “Implementation”, blogger Gideon Lewis-Kraus mashes up management consulting and Inception to produce brilliance:

“If you fail,” says Watanabe, “you will stay in ‘limbo,’ which means spending the rest of your life developing dynamic solutions for leveraged market-driven global enterprise frameworks across downstream cross-platform industry. If you succeed, I will help you return to your former career as an independent boutique retailer of imported artisanal tapenade.”

Read the whole thing here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2010/07/christopher-nolan-implementation.html#ixzz0vXk3Ai46

Ayyo. Too much comedy.