And we thought we had language problems! Twenty-four official languages and countless dialects is nothing compared to what modern Bhutanese are going through. The Bhutanese participant at the Neemrana litfest recounted what it's like to have over 100 languages trying to find a voice in the tiny Himalayan kingdom even as they try to keep English at bay. How many languages does he speak in a day? Some half a dozen. And the family dining table is a virtual Tower of Babel: he speaks to his wife in his father's language, which is neither his wife's nor his mother-tongue, to his elder son in the newly-invented national language of Zonka (a combination of the majority language, Gazonka, with grammar adopted from Tibetan) and to the younger in a third. His debut book is in English.
Talk of airport reads—Mauritian writer Lindsey Collins couldn't stop talking of the book she discovered in an airport somewhere across the globe. No, it wasn't a bestseller type. It was called The Broken String: The Last Words of An Extinct People by Neil Bensun. Bensun, an art historian, actually took down the words of this now extinct tribe. Collins cited a tribal woman's definition of the purpose of life from the book: "...to visit people and hear their stories." Sounded exactly like what this litfest was about!
