I have attended several in various capacities. And there are a few reasons for this perhaps:
1. Most big fests have a media partner. And one of the quid pro quo arrangements is that some senior editors will moderate panels, talk to writers and so on. 2. Some senior journos are mini celebs in their own right, and are also useful for higher profile, reaching out to foreign writers and journalists and so on. 3. Journalists also write a lot of non-fiction books in India. I am not sure what proportion of the whole corpus of non-fic. But my sense is that they do tend to serve as a sort of public intellectual in India subsuming the roles that academics, teachers and other may do overseas. So they are more than journalists in that sense. 4. Many fests have politicians. And usually you set off a journalist (usually TV) against politicians on stage. This creates a kind of staged tension on stage. Or real tension. 5. And besides authors, and perhaps more so than authors, the largest supply of articulate firangs free to do the fest kind of thing are foreign correspondents working on India. So that is them. (Unlike the UK, for instance, India does not have a large number of foreign students or professors who can be summoned to do sessions.) 6. Litfests are also a kind of entertainment jamboree for anybody who writes. In some sense I have often felt the literature is incidental to these fests. They are good fun. But I don't think I have really come away from these with any substantial insight into the craft of writing. (Except for one session with Lawrence Wright in Jaipur which was very useful from a journalistic perspective.) So, in summary, I think a bunch of factors come together. On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 4:12 AM Meera <[email protected]> wrote: > Why are literary festivals in India less about literature and more about > journalism? That gets them the popularity of course, but where do writers > congregate? What do you all think? > > -Meera >
