Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Hyderabad Literary Festival - Day 3

And for the third day in a row I landed up at the picturesque Taramati Baradari - the drive and the place seduced me as much as the HLF. Vinod took another day off and we drove together and walked into a wonderful session - Vijayasree in conversation with Suniti Namjoshi. Suniti is a writer and poet who quit her IAS and went back to her first love, English literature, many years ago. She spoke wonderfully with great lucidity, clarity and insight. Mark Tully could not make it but there was a session on adapting to India where Gillian Wright and Robert Bohm spoke, part of which I missed. And then readings from new English fiction from an all girl gang - Srilata Rao, Swati Chawla, Sagarika Chakraboorty (whose book I reviewed earlier, and who read very well at the reading), Sudha Balagopal and Priti Aisola of Hyderabad. I stayed back after lunch to hear a fine reading by The Little Theatre group which paid tribute to Indira Goswami, Arun Kolatkar and Vaclav Havel. Many school and college students attended and it was fun to have them around. i was happy to see Aparna, my friend Ranjani's daughter, and she apparently won prizes in poetry and story writing! Wonderful.

I would have liked to stay on more and be around to clap at the valedictory but had to return early. Fantastic work done by GSP Rao, T. Vijay Kumar and their band of volunteers, young and old. I certainly do see this festival growing and becoming much larger for many reasons. Good work  then, team HLF, and a pat on the back for all concerned. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, made a few new friends, and am sure so did many others.

2 comments:

Rajendra said...

I had watched a very good play written by Vaclav Havel -a satire on a totalitarian dictator who dictates that a totally new language be used by all citizens, just to show them who's the boss and control them, persecute them.

This was in USA, Lander college dept. of Drama, whose students used to put up plays. I remember it after so many years.

Harimohan said...

The reading from his work was equally brilliant. A satirical piece again.