Learning lessons at Asia’s biggest literary festival

The Jaipur Literary Festival is only in its fifth year but it’s already billed as Asia’s biggest such event, and with more than 12,000 attending last year, it's now the biggest free literary festival world-wide—you only pay for the food (and the books).

I came yesterday from my home in Delhi, to this famous old pink Moghul city—the capital of the Indian desert state of Rajasthan—where you sense the magic of India’s history and see all the modern fun and chaos as well.

The festival started this morning but last night the organisers were learning a tough lesson: if you hold a festival in a country which is a terrorism target and has thick fog in winter, prepare for the worst.

Over the past few days more than a dozen speakers have been marooned abroad due to problems with obtaining Indian visas, which are becoming more difficult to obtain as anti-terrorism measures are put in place. And yesterday more than 100 people, both speakers and delegates, were stranded in fog at Delhi airport for several hours, unable to take off for the 250km flight here.

As darkness fell, two of the key first-day speakers were still yet to arrive: Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, the queen mother of the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and Girish Karnad, a famous Indian playwright, film-maker and actor, who was due to deliver the opening address on "Entertaining India".



This amazing festival is unusual because it originally started out as an Indian festival celebrating local language as well as Indian English writing, yet now brings in leading international figures—there is a Nobel laureate billed, as well as Booker and Pulitzer prize winners among the famous names that include Wole Soyinka, Roberto Calasso, Hanif Kureishi, Niall Ferguson, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Tina Brown, Claire Tomalin, Michael Frayn and more.

The co-directors are the irrepressible Willie Dalrymple, who has made Delhi his book-writing home and has just written Nine Lives, and Namita Gokhale, a well known Indian author and publisher. Her brilliantly illustrated The Puffin Mahabharata was published a few months ago, explaining the twists and turns of this ancient epic in flowing style

Come back again for more blogs in the next few days as the crowds gather and local people and school children mix with the famous and not so famous writers from India and around the world.