I’m currently in the Pink City for the Jaipur Literature Festival. Seeing a lot, hearing a lot and feeling even more. I figured this would be the best way to document it all. The fact that I’m here alone just heightens the experience. It’s been a while hasn’t it, how are you guys doing? I hope you’ve missed me because I know I certainly have.
I reached the festival only by mid afternoon and was only able to attend three sessions on day one. Strangely, two out of those three were poetry events. Not because of the sessions themselves, I mean a Literature Fest is exactly the type of place you’d expect recitations and seminars on rhyme and verse. But because, I haven’t developed an understanding of poetry and hence an appreciation.
I blame a lot of this on the Indian schooling system. We studied a lot of poems in our English classes but we weren’t taught about poetry. We learnt to identify the grammatical devices in a poem - the metaphors, similes, alliterations - but nothing about the language itself. The meaning behind the words was dictated rather than interpreted. By relegating English to just another subject in the curriculum, the material we were studying lost its subjectivity.
I don’t blame this on our English teachers, I blame it on the board. My high school English teacher, Mita Ma’am, was a charming old lady who always encouraged discussion in the classroom. I remember the way her eyes would twinkle when she’d read aloud a stanza to us and how she’d try and evoke that feeling in us. But the words never moved us in the way it did for her. Because after spending half the class sharing and talking about what the poet was trying to say, we’d all jot down the same notes in our books. What you felt didn’t matter as much as what would get you marks on the exam. We subconsciously ingrained that there is a right and wrong in art. The English classes in school were a dead poets society, in its own way.
This repeated institutionalization of the language left poetry as a foreign language to me. And, I tried hard to change that. I bought collections of poems, attended open mics and even tried writing some of my own but it never touched anything within.
The first session I attended yesterday was one on Love, Loss & Longing Urdu poetry by a writer who is trying to make the works of Ghalib, Mir and numerous other Urdu poets more accessible. When he read out some of the shers in the book he had compiled, the people around me would sigh, utter wah waahis and smack their lips in appreciation. So many times, they’d collectively complete the shers for the writer on stage. It was strangely invigorating but it was a passive high. I felt swayed by the energy of those around me but I wasn’t moved. I had FOMO despite being there. As the host wrapped up the session, he addressed the young people in the room and asked them to always keep two things in mind - that while the past hour had been spent discussing romance and the complexities of the matters of the heart, we shouldn’t forget that the most important thing to keep in mind about love is respect. You can’t have one without the other. And second, he passionately and with a desperation, urged us to read and expose ourselves to Urdu poetry. He said the language will widen our understanding of the world. Maybe to decipher the foreignness of poetry I need to read it in a foreign language.
The second poetry session I attended wasn’t as ethereal. It was the last one for the day, where a handful of poets were given a handful of minutes and a mic to recite their work. It was like being back in English class all over again. Except this time I channeled my boredom by scrolling through my phone, looking for things to do in Jaipur at night. The only part of the session I enjoyed didn’t involve poetry. It was by a poet who read the foreword of her book and spoke about Instagram poets and the herculean effort it took for her to not stop posting her writing on social media for validation. Your work isn’t measured by double taps, she said. It means more than that.
I sought her out after the session and told her I resonated with what she said and asked her to break out of the instant gratification loop of social media. She laughed and said, if I find the answer to that question, I should tell her.
But here I am at a cafe in Jaipur on Saturday morning, posting my musings on Instagram for you fine folk to like and validate me, So clearly, I’ve got some way to go.
📢 Jaipur Lit Fest - Day 1
Totally get it when you talk of a passive high. I experience it when I read your pieces on sports😃Please keep these updates coming👍👍
Enjoy your time in Jaipur and we will enjoy the fest through you!