Authors’ day out at Jaipur lit fest (Snippets)

JAIPUR - Trust Indian fans to go out of their way to exhibit their excitement at meeting someone of significant import. Their love, or better call it obsession, was not to be missed at the sixth Jaipur Literary Festival.

From the done-to-death autograph to getting pictures clicked on their mobiles, the fans mobbed even the remotely known authors.

Some of the most popular were the star imports like Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee and the suave-looking Karachi homeboy H.M. Naqvi, who is riding high on the success of the DSC South Asian Literature award.

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What’s with the accent?

Hardly 15 seconds inside Diggy Palace, the venue of India’s biggest literary draw, and you can hear them. Clad in sarees, elitist hats or knee-length boots, they surely speak in English, but ceremoniously padded up with pretentious accents.

Some love to emphasise on a particular alphabet, some have a thing for vowels, everyone twists their tongue with the best of their abilities to sound Western enough.

American, British, Australian were expectedly the most sought after, but you won’t miss an occasional Scandinavian or Canadian accent as well.

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The serpentine queues

From long lines for lunch buffets to even longer lines for washrooms, the sea of crowd that turned up at the Jaipur Lit Fest made sure there was no escaping the queues.

With the sun smiling cynically overhead, sweat pored through the skin and uncomfortably ran down the face, even as authors stood in queues to get their share of food.