Everyone knew the risks of organising such a mammoth meet of writers from across Africa and Asia. And the second Neemrana litfest seems to have succumbed to them all: quota-filling, string-pulling, backdoor entries.... The result: a roll call of has-been and never-was writers who will probably pay for their ambitions by long sessions on topics chosen by some especially inventive torturers of the literary-minded. A sample of what's in store for writers at the heritage resort 126 km from Delhi:
Legacy and Assertion—History and Ethnicity, Language and Culture (Politics of writing and language.... Race, ethnicity and hegemony... "Margin" to "Centre"). And in case they didn't have enough, an after-dinner session with this ominous agenda:
Articulations of the poetic medium... Orality and enscriptions. Translated into English, this probably means poetry reading by Sudeep Sen and Co.
But delegates can't say they were not warned. The inauguration was an open-and-shut case for things ahead: a long, cliche-ridden speech by ICCR's "literary" president Karan Singh (the other VIP guest, newly-inducted minister Anand Sharma, mercifully didn't rise to the occasion), followed by a kitschy lighting of lamps ceremony, but with a slight alteration (again the creative enterprise of the backroom tormentors). All the participants had to come up on stage, two by two, to a valiant commentary by Niti Ravindran. A few, more astute delegates like Tarun Tejpal and Urvashi Butalia stayed safely out of the venue till the ceremony was over.
Then followed the articulations of the poetic medium. An African delegate recited what the organisers claimed was a poem (it had all the music of a political pamphlet). Japan's Kazuko Shiraishi rescued the day, giving a dramatic rendering of a homeless Ulysses from a ricepaper manuscript several feet long. You could see that the invitees were profoundly moved by Kazuko's poem, especially because it was in sonorous, curiously wailing Japanese.