Bibliofile
Boy! This sure sounds like a helluva fun: Quota-filling, string-pulling, backdoor entries ... a roll call of has-been and never-was writers ... long sessions on especially inventive and tortured topics ... an after-dinner session with an ominous agen
But delegates can't say they were not warned. The inauguration was an open-and-shut case for things ahead: a long, cliche-ridden speech by ICCR's "literary" president Karan Singh (the other VIP guest, newly-inducted minister Anand Sharma, mercifully didn't rise to the occasion), followed by a kitschy lighting of lamps ceremony, but with a slight alteration (again the creative enterprise of the backroom tormentors). All the participants had to come up on stage, two by two, to a valiant commentary by Niti Ravindran. A few, more astute delegates like Tarun Tejpal and Urvashi Butalia stayed safely out of the venue till the ceremony was over.
Then followed the articulations of the poetic medium. An African delegate recited what the organisers claimed was a poem (it had all the music of a political pamphlet). Japan's Kazuko Shiraishi rescued the day, giving a dramatic rendering of a homeless Ulysses from a ricepaper manuscript several feet long. You could see that the invitees were profoundly moved by Kazuko's poem, especially because it was in sonorous, curiously wailing Japanese.