A languid and sunny Sunday, an ostensibly picnic mood, some flashes of brilliance here and there, and a seamier look at literature brought the three-day Bangalore Literature Festival langurously to a close here today.
The highlight of closing day was a tête-à-tête – ‘Mera kuchh saman, tumhare paas pada hai’ – between lyricist-filmmaker Gulzar and film writer Bhawana Somaaya. Dressed in his resplendent, trademark white kurta pajama, Gulzar started off from the point that he himself had in the film industry – his accidental tryst with Bandini. He harked back in time, and elaborated on how an apparent tiff between director Bimal Roy and songwriter Shailendra had paved the way for him to enter the industry.
Gulzar reiterated that, till this point, he had never harboured any intention or desire of writing songs for Hindi films. But he was sucked in, and he delivered a hit in the form of ‘Mora gora ang layi’. Yet, it was not this song that Gulzar decided to elaborate upon, but the creative rapport that existed between the two legends of Indian cinema – filmmaker Bimal Roy and composer Sachin Dev Burman.
The conversation, however, soon veered away from Gulzar’s impressions about writing towards what he thought of working with the superstar-of-the-day Rajesh Khanna and the superstar-in-the-making Amitabh Bachchan in Anand. Thereafter, it was more of Bollywood and less of writing. Gulzar, nevertheless, kept the crowd regaled with his now-sardonic, then-impish sense of humour.
The stage for poetry, in fact, had already been set by the previous session that was moderated by city poet Mamta Sagar. It was indeed a ‘Thoughts that breathe, words that burn: A morning of poetry’ with K Satchidanandan, Ashok Vajpeyi and Nabanita Dev Sen keeping the audience in thrall with their verses.
The conversation with Scottish journalist Ian Jack that looked at ‘India from the outside’ was another session that could not, sadly, become a stimulating one with the other person, columnist and TV presenter Sunil Sethi, holding on to the mike for the better part of the hour.
Jack, nevertheless, did get a chance to speak, and described his posting in India in December 1976 as a fluke of a beginning. He recollected the “ridiculous” precautions that foreigners would take after landing in India, and went on to assert that describing Delhi as a “hardship posting” (as was thought by many diplomats and foreign journalists posted in India) as “absurd”. Jack’s flow during the session was broken a number of times as Sethi repeatedly interrupted to speak more about his own experiences.
And, there were anecdotes – from how he could not make himself ask then prime minister Morarji Desai as to whether he indeed drank his own urine, to how his piece on the stranglehold that Sanjay Gandhi had over his mother Indira ended up with him being withdrawn from India by The Times newspaper.
The Scottish journalist did have much more to share – including his frequent brushes with industrialist GD Birla who thought Gandhi would be “an interfering old man” had he lived longer, that Morarji’s son Kanti Desai was “stupid”, and that Sanjay was both “wicked and stupid”. Till, of course, KK Birla nudged his father.
When asked about industrialists who have come to dominate in recent years, Jack said he hadn’t met (Mukesh) Ambani, and quickly added that GB Birla would have never built himself a 35-storied-house.
There were, thankfully, no irritable interruptions in a later session – ‘69 shades of grey: Scripting erotica’ – that was deftly handled by branding guru Harish Bijoor. The more the sun showed signs of disappearing from the horizon (all sessions at the litfest were held outdoors), the more the conversation turned steamy. And funny, too.
Bijoor, who knew his subject well, spoke of the oral tradition of erotica being handed down generations in ancient India, and went on to say how these later found themselves translated on to stone. But later, India, he remarked, had moved a long way from the Lalita (of the detergent ads) to Savita (the toon porn that was banned in the country). The participants at the session – Sheba Karim, Minal Hajratwala and Ashok Ferry – were hardly allowed by Bijoor to leave anything out. Right from reading out their select erotic extracts, and describing where smut ends and erotica begins, they did it all.
A langurous and steamy end to a litfest, one might say. And few complained.
