Hic! In high spirits at Jaipur lit fest (Notes from Litfest)

JAIPUR - Some 500 bottles of wine, over 800 pints of beer, 500 vodka bottles and more than 500 whiskey bottles! Free booze flowed from every corner at the five-day Jaipur Literature Festival.

The three liquor stalls sitting next to each other undoubtedly attracted the largest crowd in the whole of Diggy Palace, the venue of the five-day event. Those behind the counters worked tirelessly to keep people in high spirits. The demand for a drink was directly proportional to how expensive it was.

Wine, without fail, everyday has been the first to get over, followed by whiskey and vodka. Beer survived for the longest time. Perhaps thanks to onion and petrol prices, it did not seem an expensive indulgence anymore.

-*-

Doodled autographs

Scribbling a personal message for a fan is the done thing but ever heard of doodled autographs? Graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee did exactly that for the beeline of fans (mostly women) at a book signing session.

He happily mingled with the crowd, kept them in good humour and actually took the effort to draw caricatures for everyone even as the queues of his fans kept growing longer and moved at a slower pace than Delhi’s traffic.

-*-

‘Kulhar chai’ makes a killing

A thrilled foreigner sipping piping hot tea from a humble earthen pot, the ‘kulhar’, is a sight to behold even if it is not the stuff tourism department’s postcards are made of.

The Jaipur lit fest saw the kulhar chai selling like, yes you guessed it right, hot cakes! The authors set the ball rolling by taking a fancy towards the beverage and locals followed suit, in the hope of attaining literary nirvana.

-*-

Fire Exit fails to rage

They came, they sang, but they failed to set the stage on fire. Delhi rock band Fire Exit tried everything in the rock band handbook guide to get the crowd rolling but they couldn’t even manage the customary applause, forget about the precious headbanging.

They jumped, joked, laughed, but the inebriated audience yawned in boredom. As a girl said to her apologetic friend who had entered midway during the performance, “Dude, don’t be in such a hurry. You missed nothing.”

(Mohita Nagpal can be contacted at mohita.n@ians.in)