Jaipur Literature Festival 2014, Day 3--The Importance of Being a Good Listener.

After an intense first two days, I took things a bit easy today by attending sessions during the second half of the day.

I was very excited to attend Partha Mitter's session on his seminal text Much Maligned Monsters.  Unfortunately, he was not a very inspiring speaker, so I left the session.  However, I do plan to read his book as it challenges the western way of looking at Indian art.

The highlight of my day was definitely, Reza Aslan's session on his book Zealot: Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth along with AN Wilson.   Aslan began by stating that there is a huge chasm between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history.  Regarding the Jesus of history, there is consensus on only three things about him:
He was a Jew
He lived in the First half of the first century
He launched a movement of the Jews
However, given that the world of the Jews was well documented by the Romans we can make certain inferences about him. In Aslan's words we can make, "educated speculation based on what we know of the world we live in".
He mentioned that, in his opinion, Jesus' lost years were not spent far away but rather spent in rebuilding a town close to Nazareth.  AN Wilson disagreed with Aslan on this point saying that this theory of Aslan's was 'fantasy'.
Aslan then went to explain how Jesus was influenced by the ideas of zealotry, in particular the overthrow of Roman Rule.
What made this session particularly enjoyable apart from Aslan's engaging talk was that even though Alan and Wilson disagreed, they were so civilised about the whole matter and their arguments to a person who did not speak English would have seemed to be friendly banter.

Given that I had signed up for Sandel's MOOC on justice, attending his session was a no-brainer.  My immediate reaction to his session was that he is a gifted and skilled teacher.  I was super impressed by the level of his research to customise his 'lecture' to the Indian scenario because of which he had terms like All India Rank, figures such as reservation quotas and Sachin
Tendulkar's yearly income on the tips of his fingertips.  Truly the mark of a great teacher is the level of his/her preparedness.  Sandel deployed the Socratic method throughout his session, questioning members of the audience, and asking the brave ones to counter the other's argument.  He wrapped up the session, stating that public discourse helped develop good civic habits such as listening to others even if you don't agree with their point of view.

Jaipur Literature Festival 2014, Day 2--A Critique

Day two saw my initial euphoria of being at the literature festival subside and replaced by a more exacting frame of mind.  I spent the day classifying writers into good and bad speakers, for despite being masters of the word, not every writer is necessarily a good speaker. So, who were the good and the bad and the indifferent....(of the sessions I attended)?

Interestingly, some of the best speakers were professors...after all if you want to hold your class' attention you better be a good orator!  Professors whose classrooms I would love to be in include:
Marcus du Sautoy--whose fascinating lecture on symmetry and the language of maths made me, a totally non-maths person, pick up his book Finding Moonshine!
Anthony Beevor--always great to listen to him.  While talking about non-fiction he pin-pointed the problem with historical fiction--a genre that I find uncomfortable dealing with.  According to him, the problem with historical fiction is ascribing thoughts and feelings to real, historical figures.
Reza Aslan, a consistently engaging speaker, mentioned how he does not like the distinction between fiction and non-fiction to be that the latter is true.  Rather he prefers to define non-fiction as being tethered to reality.  He explained that the non-fiction tag gives a voyeuristic layer to the story which makes it more true.  He also stated that the goal of all writing is to reveal character.

Other impressive non-professor writers were:
Xiaolu Guo who pointed out that East Asian writing was more poetic and less narrative than that of the Western world and then went on to condemn American Literature as being over-rated.  I do admire such people who don't hesitate to speak their minds and I do agree with her when I think of Franzen's Freedom!
Nadifa Mohammed a very articulate speaker pointed out that FGM in Somalia is a part of every day life and therefore is regarded in a different way than outsiders view it.
Jim Crace--always wonderful to listen to.  According to him 'global novels' are non-English novels that capture the imagination more than the country they are written in such as Achebe's and Marquez's works.
Fariba Hachtroubi--what a passionate speaker!  She totally held one's attention and had so much to say about Iran and women's rights, echoing Gloria Steinem and Shereen El Faki, in the importance of having control over one's own body.
Shereen El Faki pointed out how the Arabs a thousand years ago were very open about sexuality and that it is Islamic fundamentalism that has made the discourse on sexuality so narrow.  I am definily attending her session on 'Sex and the Citadel'.
Carsten Jensen with his engaging anecdotes has proved  to be a great writer to listen to.  Today's anecdotes were about how reading helped calm and reassure him whether as a young child scared in his room or an adult travelling on a dangerous road to Kabul.
Andrew Graham-Dixon's session on Caravaggio I hear was amazing.  I got to hear a bit from him on the session on 'How can the sacred be sensuous' and I could understand why his earlier session was such a hit.  Here he pointed out that in Boticelli's Birth of Venus, the cloak being held by Venus was shaped as a vagina--only the male eye could figure that one!  Guess I better examine the painting carefully now.
George Michell.  I guess I was already biased in his favour having enjoyed studying his works in univ.  I was so disappointed that he spoke so briefly today as the others were monopolising the show.  In the session on the sensuous and sacred focusing on Indian temple art, he stated that there was a strong connection between the court and the notion of what a beautiful image was and that 90% of the imagery of the Indian temple was that of the privileged elite.  I can't wait to hear more from him on Monday.
Samantha Shannon, I place her under this category not because she made a huge impact on me but because I think that what she has achieved so far is very credible and because she was interesting to listen to, despite her young age.  I liked the way she pointed out how YA which is supposed to refer to a target audience of 12 to 18, now refers to a genre of fiction!

Writers who are proficient speakers but failed to impress were:
Jhumpa Lahiri:  she is an intelligent writer and made several pertinent points, but lacked the x factor...
Vidya Dehija...yes she is a professor but her lecture with loads of quotes from tamil poets was not terribly exciting.  I found her whole perspective very westernised starting with her investigation into why the sacred in India is sensuous, for this is not a strange thing for Indians.  Furthermore, I felt that this approach led her to a superficial explanation that it was a way for the patrons to ask to be  blessed with conjugal bliss.  Yet, we do know that the sexual images in places of worship in
India have a deeper meaning...a way of attaining another plane of awareness through the release of sexual energy.

The challenged speakers were:
Bejan Matur...in her case I think not being a native English speaker proved difficult for her, so while she made some interesting points she failed to excite one's imagination.
Nadeem Aslam...an extremely disappointing speaker, especially given that his books have been so well received.
Cyrus Mistry was perhaps the worst speaker...but he  went up in my esteem by publicly acknowledging that public speaking was not his forte.  I will read his Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, as it just won the DSC prize for South Asian Literature.

So, as you can see today was quite an intense day, because of which I am only going to attend the second half of the day tomorrow.  Well, the real reason actually is that strangely no session in the first half rally appeals to me.