JLF 2015 Day 2

Had a busy time in Jaipur hanging out with the friends and returned to an equally busy time in Delhi with family and catching both a symposium on Nauras: The Many Arts of the Deccan and the India Art Fair, hence the really late updates on JLF.

As mentioned earlier, Day 2 of JLF was witness to a lot of rain; but not a surprise as all the weather forecasts had been predicting rain on Thursday for over a month.  So, when William Dalrymple excused the failure of the organisers to make provisions for the rain  by the trite observation that Jaipur is a desert and therefore rain was never quite expected, I failed to find the humour in the statement.  Needless to say, given that the festival was a Teamwork production, chaos reigned supreme.  The venues were reduced from 6 to 3 for the first half of the day and programs shrunk from 60 to 30 minute presentations.  Not a bad idea....BUT why did the information desk have no information about what was happening when and where?  The volunteers were clueless every time there was a deviation from the schedule.  Sure, there were updates being posted on the festival's FB page, but there was no accessible wifi at the venue and 3G was barely operable, hence, as an audience member one could not access the updates.  Not surprisingly, I missed the session on Terror and Faith as it's venue was changed and no one could tell me where it was!!!!!
So, what were the highlights of the day?  Excellent sessions by Neil Rennie on Pirates of the Indian Ocean, SR Faruqi on Of Beauty and Truth (I'm definitely picking up his book The Mirror of Beauty to read) Daud Ali on Courtly culture in Early Medieval India, Saryu Doshi took us through a Jain Pancha-kalyanaka Pata, LLewelyn Morgan on the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  The session Writing Back was interesting as Sahar Delijani, Kamila Shamsie, Meena Kandasamy and Eimar McBride discussed the gender bias in the publishing world, making me wonder just how little change there has been since the time  of the Bronte sisters.
The session by Mandy Ord and Annie Zaidi began enticingly...a retelling of  the Anarkali legends in comic form...but once I saw that their research material was not all true to their period--a Rajput fort belonging to a later period was their model for an earlier Mughal Fort--along with their cavalier dismissal of the fact when pointed out--I tuned off!