Taken September 27, 2013

I spent Friday September 27th at the Bangalore Literature Festival. This was the second year of the event, and the first day of this year’s festival. Pictured onstage here is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a world-famous guru and charitable foundation leader who is headquartered in Bangalore. He drew the biggest crowd that I saw, although the rest of the talks I went to were on a secondary stage called Lawn Bagh. (“Mysore Park” was the name of the main stage.)

I went to a panel entitled “Vision for India” that featured a politician, a retired General, and a well-known pundit. The panel solicited the three men’s opinions on the future of India. It was fascinating to the international affairs / economist trained part of me. There were some political and economic reforms all of them seemed to agree on, but, great for this type of panel, there was some controversy as well.

I also went to panels on crime fiction, geographic-centric poetry, and the coexistence of literary and commercial fiction in the publishing space.

I was impressed with the festival. The caliber of speakers and authors was high. They had to contend with something that no other literary festival that I’ve been to had to, and that is that there are many written languages  in India–and at least one French and  German writer each that I saw. While English was the lingua franca of the festival, I heard poetry in Tamil, French, and other languages as well.

The campus it was held on, Velankani Park, was sparkling clean held a lot of interesting plant life.  This was my first trip out to Electronic City. It seemed odd that they held the festival so far from the city center, but I can see why in a way. As one of the speakers said during the “Visions” panel, it’s a first world oasis in a third world country. The little I saw, verified that. That said, if they wish to grow, they may need to put it closer to the city center. (Of course, as the metro comes on-line and people start using it, this may become a moot point.)

They did have trouble controlling the schedule. By the end of the day they were about 45 minutes behind. This is something that they’ll have to control if they wish the festival to grow beyond three stages. In terms of quality, this was very much like a scaled down version of my previous home city’s literary festival, the Decatur Book Festival. However, DBF has about 20 stages and a much bigger vendor space. This means the DBF has to have “stage Nazi’s” that will crack the whip. Even with a compact three-stage campus, they probably need to build defined break space into the schedule.