Shailaza's Blog

Tag: jlf2024

  • When Poets Cook

    Maria Goretti is unlike any Bollywood wife that you may have heard about. Though she is the wife of the celebrated actor Arshad Warsi, this mother of two believes in making her own mark in the world, with her books about poetry and food.

    Maria Goretti with her children

    When one is readying to interview a person who is a celebrity in her own right and belongs to the Hindi film industry, one tries to prepare for all sorts of scenarios (maybe she will not have time or not grant the interview or will have some qualms etc). However, Maria Goretti believes in singing a very different tune. She is not only married to the celebrated actor Arshad Warsi but is also a celebrated VJ, dancer, actress, TV show host in her own right but when she starts talking you realize that she believes in being as simple as the food and poems she writes about.
    We caught up with her on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024.

    What makes you write? Do you have a particular time that you write in?

    I don’t know how it came about when I first started writing. But now writing is almost like an out-of-body experience for me. So, I cannot really say that I write at this particular time or that time. It’s just something that I do and it’s become part of my life now. It doesn’t matter where I am. I could be in a completely crowded room and I will just get a few thoughts in my mind about something and I would want to put it down because it needs to be said maybe not to anyone, just to me.

    Maria Goretti with Mandira Bedi

    How did you start writing poetry?

    It was very similar to how I started writing. It just happened. When I was a child, I used to write poetry but then lost touch with it. When my children became older, I started getting some time to pursue my own passions. I started blogging and cooking. I used to write poems about experiences or whatever used to catch my fancy.

    With her husband Arshad Warsi

    Is it tough to write a poem?

    No, I don’t think writing poems is a tough job. For me, it is the editing that is tougher because you edit your work, you scrutinize each and every line and you end up hating everything. I realized that I would sit and just write a poem sometimes from start to finish and then I would revisit it maybe two or three times after that. I would make a few changes in it. But when I was doing the book, it was the most difficult thing for me to do.
    I think I read them so much that I just didn’t like them anymore. As a result, I redid half the book while I was editing it.

    How do you think a poem helps?

    I don’t know whether a poem helps anyone else, but it definitely helps the person writing. So, I think a lot of times when you read something, something in it may or may not resonate with you, you know, because I think most of the people who write poems, it comes from a very passion-filled part of your soul. I think it comes from a space that is, that is having probably an outpouring about something that you’re listening to, something that’s going on in the world, something that has probably affected you, affected the people who are around you, a movie, a situation in life. I think, I think most poems are about life in different stages. And I feel, for me especially, when I meet people and if they have read my book, and some of them come up and tell me, ma’am, that piece was really nice, it really talked to me, I feel really wonderful about it. You know, there is an oneness that happens when you read poetry.
    There’s a feeling of, okay, I know that feeling, and I know that place, or I have felt like that before. And I think that’s very, that’s very satisfying.

    As a child when you read a poem, did it really affect you?

    At the time, it did not affect me. I have been reading poems since childhood and have even recited some on the stage. But I don’t remember being touched by it. But today when I read, it is different for me, because there is no compulsion to me because I’m reading it by choice.

    So today, when you read somebody else’s poem, what happens to you?

    Sometimes it touches me. At other times, I think of what the author was thinking when he was, or she was writing it. And sometimes, of course, it leaves you with nothing, because you probably are not yet open to receiving whatever the poem is trying to tell you.
    I think a poem is an art. It’s like looking at a painting. Some people get it, some people don’t. Some people wonder, what is that speck? Why is it so expensive? I could do that or I could have done that.

    You have also written a cook book. What is food to you?

    I think food is art for the person making it. I think food is art for somebody who understands it and for somebody who loves food. More than everything else, it is a binding force. I always feel that when every time I cook or I am doing something for my friends, nobody may be talking about the food, which is the least important, but there is a gathering that happens.

    Some people are enjoying it, some are laughing, others are talking to each other, who are having probably more or you must have this because I tasted it. You know, it does that. I think food brings people together and I think that is beautiful.

    Should everyone regardless of their gender know cooking?

    I think everyone should be able to fry an egg if they are non-vegetarian and everyone needs to be able to make something for themselves (not counting Maggie here), that they live on and not be dependent. My 19-year-old son has been cooking since he was four years old. He makes his food, which I don’t like very much. I want him to sit at the table and eat with everyone else.

    What is the kind of food you like to eat?

    At home, I have my parents living with me. So, there is one kind of food made for them. And then there are my teen kids who look at the food and are like, Ugh! What is that? And then there is me in the middle. So, I am constantly juggling between, Oh my God, why don’t you like that? That is so tasty and that’s good for your health and they look at me like, that’s old people’s food. But having said that, I love clean food. I am somebody who actually changed the way I look at food.
    I would say 70% of the time, what I love to eat is the kind of food that Ayurveda tells you to eat. Nice. You know? I have learned that, I would say I got changed in my head because I love doing a cleanse for myself once in a year. And I remember that when I first went to an Ayurveda place, I tasted the food and I was quite amazed at how simple it was and how beautiful it tasted. And that brought about a huge change in the way I cook.

    What’s your favourite dish?

    I am a pasta lover and I love a simple aglio olio pepperoncino. I also like dal chawal.

    So, how are you able to wear so many hats like an author, a chef and a mom?

    Easily. But I take that back. Being a mom is not easy. I think the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life is being a mom. Because it doesn’t, you don’t have a manual of what is right, what is wrong. You’re just winging it all the time. Sometimes you hit the jackpot, sometimes you’re absolutely wrong. When I’m absolutely wrong, I say sorry.

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on 17 July 2024

  • AI, Mathematics and More

    Marcus du Sautoy believes that artificial intelligence learns from humans the way a child learns from his parents. He says that whether AI turns good or bad in the long run will depend on the environment humans develop it in.

    Does the AI emulate humans the way children learn from their parents?

    Exactly. I often give the comparison to, it’s like the relationship between a parent and a child. Of course, the child reflects the genetics of the parent, yet the child is different because they interact with the environment, they interact with other friends, other people, other countries, and that is part of its learning process. For example, Picasso, his genes are the genes of his parents. Yet we don’t say that the art that he produced is the result of his parents. Yes, partly that may have happened, but it’s mostly his environment. So the AI is written, the code, first of all, by the parent, but then the AI interacts with everything else. It becomes its own, has its own identity, separate from the person who coded it.

    Yes, you’re saying that it is learning from the environment around it. So, if the environment around it is malicious it can learn that behaviour?

    Unfortunately, yes. The nice thing is you can steer, so you can steer, you can try and get an AI to identify malicious behaviour. Then you give it malicious behaviour and it says, okay, I recognise, I now recognise that that’s bad and that’s good. Gradually it starts to get a moral code. You can incentivise it to learn a moral code.

    How can you incentivise AI?

    It’s like playing a game. So, you say you lose the game if you play… Here’s an example of bad behaviour. It learns that. Here’s an example of good behaviour. Now here’s an example of something new. What do you regard this? Is this closer to something bad or something good? And it makes a guess and it says, no, you got that wrong, that’s bad. And so it will update its code and say, okay, I will get that right next time. And so it’s a learning process. It’s about learning what’s good. And so then it can be used in, for example, in a social context to help other people identify good and bad. So AI is very, very flexible. And it’s about how we use it.

    There’s a very interesting novel. For JLF, I interviewed Ian McEwen, who wrote a novel called Machines Like Me. And it’s about a moral dilemma between two humans and an AI. And in the book, Ian explores the fact that the AI actually may be more moral in its decision. It will be thinking about the greater good of society, whilst the humans very often think about individual good. And so maybe AI often is better at making moral decisions.

    Can AI develop an ego?

    Well, I think AI can definitely demonstrate characteristics of ego. So again, in some ways, what do you mean by an ego? That means almost you’re saying, is AI conscious? Because it’s got to have a sense of self different from other. But often when we say a sense of ego, we mean prioritising the self. So again, a sense of self will come very much later. That’s about consciousness. But is it altruistic or selfish? Or different AI will be different according to its learning process?

    Do you watch science fiction movies or series like Doctor Who?

    Yes! My children are obsessed with it. It has a lot of things which we think are futuristic or sci-fi. Science fiction is very often good at exploring what’s possible which then becomes science fact. So not everything is possible. The time machine, for example, HG Wells, we don’t think the current physics doesn’t have the opportunity to go back in time. And of course that’s a great theme for a lot of science fiction novels, is going back in time. I mean, Doctor Who is a time traveller, the Time Lord. But I think it’s very interesting that science is about imagination and that can first happen inside something like Doctor Who or a science fiction story. And one of the things you see, we’re already seeing cybernetics taking great advances. So, yeah, scientists’ imagination is quite close to a novelist’s imagination.

    But then, if AI or advancements in science can be harmful for the human race in the future, do you think we should curtail this imagination?

    I think you can never do that. So, one strategy is to try and put things back in the box. And I don’t think humanity has a very good track record with keeping things in the box. I think the best thing is to let these things out of the box and then for us to understand how do we limit the bad and profit from the good. I don’t think I would want to have not discovered what gets released by splitting an atom. But that can be used to solve the energy crisis and climate change. Or it could be used to blow us all up. But it’s about what we do with that technology. My belief is always we should not ever limit discovery but we should limit what we do with that discovery.

    Okay, do you believe that there’s a theory that there’s a left brain and right brain function. The right brain I believe is for creativity or logic. Do you believe maths comes only for those who are more left brain oriented?

    So first of all, this science of left brain, right brain has been shown to be incorrect. I mean it’s true that language is more located in the left brain, the Broca area. I’ve made quite a few programs for the BBC about the brain. There’s much more fluidity between the sides of the brain. So, if one side of the brain gets damaged, very often it can recover and replace activity in the other side of the brain. Language seems to be very localized in the left. Now you’re right, there does seem to be more emphasis towards, for example, the imagination and solving new problems seems to be a right brain activity. And actually, there’s a pattern recognition. And so, mathematics is actually quite a right brain activity, interestingly. So not a language side, but more about new environments where often we see right brain activity. And interestingly, right brain controls left hand. I think there’s evidence there are more left-handed mathematicians than you would have in a normal population. But I think one has to be very careful because we’ve seen that the brain is not as cleanly divided up as we thought it was in a left right brain.

    How can you get students who don’t love maths in a later stage of life to actually fall in love? Let’s say quadratic equations, you know all those complicated math, how do you get them to love math?

    I think coming back to mathematics again that you didn’t get the first time, for example, quadratic equations, you didn’t get it the first time, but we’re a bit like rabbits in a headlight. You know, we freeze. But then when you come to it again you say, I don’t understand why I found that so frightening. So going back to something, very often you can relax and you can find a new way in. In fact, I’m a big supporter of actually redoing years. There’s no point going on if you’ve failed the year. Much better to redo it rather than crashing on and getting more and more anxious. But I think, you know, our brains maturate. They get more sophisticated. And somebody who’s 18, for example, will begin to understand why the things that they were learning might be important for what they’re doing. So, for example, in London, the University for the Arts London, where a lot of artists go to train, there’s a course which is Maths for Artists. It is the fastest course to be signed up for. Because by then the artists who are 18, 19, 20 realise, oh my gosh, to make this thing or to plan this thing or I want to make something with this particular structure. And they realise, oh my gosh, but I actually need maths to this. Then they are suddenly trying to make things which they need mathematical ideas. And so they go, if only they told me that when I was 11, I might have concentrated but I thought it was nothing to do with what I love, which is painting or architecture. My books are mostly written for adults who I want them to value the maths such that changes the culture and it feeds down to their kids or their employees and they value maths and they realise, no, no, having somebody who thinks mathematically is a very powerful team player.

    Someone once said that you should always let your children take a business course to learn about life.

    I don’t know. I’ve heard less, I’ve heard a movement away from that. That actually, it’s much better. I’ve heard more and more people saying don’t do MBAs and things like this. That actually, it’s teaching a very set way of thinking. Actually, better to do something very, just expanding the mind. Go, do philosophy instead and expand the mind. I would prefer you not to go and do a business degree. Go and do a maths degree. It makes you think about solving problems. Then go and work in a business. Don’t go and learn a business degree. I think that’s a terrible waste of an opportunity.

    …Concluded

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on July 11th, 2024

  • Games, numbers and play

    Marcus du Sautoy is a professor of mathematics who loves to play games with Maths. Though initially he found math tough, once he discovered the magic of Math, there was no going back.

    For most of us, a person good in mathematics would perhaps look like a nerd, wear high power spectacles and would constantly prefer company of books over humans. At least, that is the perception we have grown up with. However, Marcus Du Sautoy begs to differ. Marcus is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and the author of well-known books that dispel the myth and terror associated with mathematics. When I caught up with him for a tet-e-tat on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, I realized mathematics was not just about numbers but also nature. Some excerpts from a freewheeling chat with the man who loves to play games with math.

    What is it like to visit the Jaipur Literature Festival?

    Oh! Its hectic but so much fun. I get to talk about everything. I have been to seven sessions and each session has been a different experience. Today was games, yesterday was parenting in the digital age, I have done AI and publishing, AI and creativity, and tonight I’m talking about free speech.

    So what do you like about the Jaipur Literature Festival?

    This is my fourth time at the Jaipur Literature Festival. I love the fact that it brings so many people from different disciplines, different countries, different philosophies, and that I think is what’s so exciting, sharing time with people with very different ways of looking at the world. So, I’m a scientist, so it’s nice to bring a scientific perspective on political issues, for example. I like the variety.

    Have you been to Jaipur before?

    I love coming to India, and especially Rajasthan. Last year I came with my wife, and after the festival we travelled around Jodhpur, Udaipur, and I’ve been also other places before that. And in Jodhpur we got to know a very wonderful family who are into making carpets, and today I’m having two carpets delivered to my hotel from the family. We are good friends with them. They invited us to their daughter’s wedding, but unfortunately it was two weeks before the festival, so we couldn’t go.

    Was mathematics easy for you as a child?

    Math wasn’t necessarily easy for me. I think that you have to remember that mathematics is a little bit like learning a musical instrument. You can’t play the piano immediately. You have to practice, spend time in that world, and gradually it gets easier.
    I think people have to remember that you don’t have to get everything right the first time, but you have to understand why you got something wrong and learn from that. I only fell in love with mathematics when I was about 12 or 13, and the key for me was seeing some exciting stories of mathematics, not just doing multiplication and all the technical side. And again, it’s like learning an instrument.
    If you just did scales and arpeggios, you get bored. That’s not music. Sometimes I feel like the mathematics taught in school is not the real mathematics. Fortunately, I had was a teacher who showed me these stories about math. Things about prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, infinity, geometry, and for me, that was what made me fall in love with the subject, seeing there were so many exciting stories inside there, which if I had learnt the mathematics I did at school, I’d be able to understand or now write myself.

    Okay, can you share some of those stories, maybe one story about what made it so interesting for you?

    Yeah, sure for example, Fibonacci numbers, which many kids might see, but it’s not on curriculum. So these are numbers which go 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and there’s a pattern because you add the two previous numbers. 5 plus 8 gives you 13, 8 plus 13 gives you 21, 13 plus 21 gives you 34. So, these numbers are growing out of the other numbers. Now, these numbers are all over nature. If you count the number of petals on a flower, it’s either 5 or 8 or 13. If you cut open a fruit, like an apple, you get a 5-pointed star. A banana has a 3-pointed star, a persimmon has an 8. If you take a pineapple and you count the number of cells, it’s a Fibonacci number. When I tell this to my children respond about nature doing mathematics, they start thinking that math must be important, it’s not something arbitrary. But the other beautiful thing is these numbers are important in music as well. If you’re a drummer, a tabla player, with long and short beats, the number of rhythms goes in this sequence, 5, 8, 13. So for me, that’s the kind of story you want to tell. Then the numbers start to creep into nature, into music, into poetry. And then that connects with the things, you know, maybe your child is not immediately interested in numbers, but they might like music. Or they might like the garden. For me, that’s the key, is finding why mathematics is everywhere. And then the children start saying, I want to understand the world, I need to understand maths.

    How can teachers convert mathematics into a game for children?

    I think we’re in a golden age where a teacher who may not be so confident with mathematics can still teach well because there are lots of resources on the internet that they can use to try and help the children. In particular, for example, I created an internet maths school based on gaming. It’s called MangaHigh.com, and what we did was to take the mathematical curriculum, turn it into a game and then the kids learn the mathematics by playing the game. And the game is clever enough so it understands, well, the student is finding this difficult, so it takes them down a level to lift their confidence up, or if a student is just eating it all up, so it pushes them to the higher levels. I think we’re in a great age where technology can help a teacher to, not replace a teacher.

    Somewhere, you said that there is a possibility that AI can become conscious. What if that happens? Will we be in danger?

    With new technologies, there are always positives and negatives, and it’s about how we use that technology. So, if AI becomes conscious, we want it to be empathetic to the human race. We can we create AI that understands us and we understand it. So as with any new relationship, it’s about building trust. If the thing is conscious, it’s sophisticated, then we’ll understand because we want to create an AI which isn’t incentivized to wipe out humanity.

    How can that happen?

    I think what AI is very good at is learning behaviours. So if we give it empathetic behaviour, then it will produce empathetic results. If we lead it astray by depicting abusive behaviour, it will respond with abusive results. We’ve seen many examples of this, where a chatbot put online interacts with people who are racist, misogynist, and it learns how to repeat that, and that’s what we don’t want. We’re at the momentin control of its evolution, and so we need to take responsibility to take it in a positive direction.

    Does that mean that if we create robots or anything, it will learn that behaviour?

    Yes. And unfortunately, because it’s learning on human behaviour, and human behaviour is not always terribly good, there are dangers that this thing is learning to succeed at the expense of everybody else. That is not a great learning model.

    So, will we need to reformat the humans first?

    (Laughs) I think so, right? That’s a very good way to put it. But I think that’s what’s interesting and I think people don’t realize this, the AI that is emerging is a reflection of our values and our way of looking at the world, because it’s learning from our world, our art, our writing, our literature. And so it’s not a new thing. It’s a new take on an old thing, which is humanity.

    ..To Be Continued

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on July 10, 2024

  • West is not the best

    Through out the history, the Europeans have proclaimed their civilization as the best. They believed that they were born to educate an illiterate world and they were the ones who invented and discovered everything. However, Professor Josephine Quinn believes the western civilization’s achievements were nothing more than borrowed patchwork from different civilizations.

    When Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at the Oxford University and the author of the book ‘How the world made the West- A, 4000-year history’ said that the racial hierarchies and colonial expansions of the 19th century were a result of this civilizational thinking that made Europeans believe that they were a supreme race born to bring civilization to the ignorant world, people at the Jaipur Literature Festival were spell bound. She argued that societies of the ‘West’ cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and Asian religion. The founders of ‘Western civilisation’ didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their intermingling’s the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.
    Talking to Professor Quinn is like jumping into the pensieve of memories in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. When she speaks, you feel as if you have stepped into a time machine that will take you back to where it all first began. She was visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024 and I had the opportunity to interview her.

    No matter, what kind of history you read, each culture seems to be saying that they came first or their people discovered or invented everything or even created the first civilization. What is the truth?

    (Laugh) That’s great, I think as a historian you end up realising that the idea of coming first never works because then you always, there’s always so much of stuff from earlier. Even if we just stick to human history, what we actually have records of, it’s only the last tiny, tiny minimal proportion of what’s going on. The stories people are telling each other, the wars that are happening, there’s so much that is only preserved, interestingly, in places which retained an oral culture for a really long time. So if you go to places like Australia or Polynesia and so on, where oral traditions remained the main way of passing on memory until really the last century or two, that’s the kind of place where you can begin to see stories that are reaching back tens of thousands of years in some cases, where you begin to see climate change from the Ice Age coming up into the myths that are being told and so on. But I think apart from that, and again it’s a very big picture, if you’re looking at sort of ideologies and the lights people give the world and so on, I think it’s impossible to say that any particular place or thing comes first, because from the very beginning people are interacting with each other, they’re interacting across it. I know it very inconvenient for the leaders of modern nations, but people just didn’t organise themselves neatly into those same structures in the past.

    But I read somewhere that there was a woman called Eve and she was in Africa. Is that true?

    So, the truth is all humans are interrelated, which means that on some level we all share the same ancestry. The idea of, I think what you’re talking about is mitochondrial Eve, who was this character created by scientists who working on DNA couple of decades ago to describe the fact that everyone is interconnected. The theory was that you could connect it all back to one person who would have been in Africa. Today, the studies on DNA have progressed quite a lot further than that and quite recently, scientists have discovered that is we’re actually all interconnected.

    I mean the way people say is everyone is everyone’s 11th cousin within quite large geographical areas. So, you probably don’t even need to go back as far as Eve to find people who everyone alive today are connected to each other.

    Generally children find history very boring and you are into ancient history. How do you find it interesting? Why are you in this profession and what makes it interesting for you?

    Actually, when I first went to university I was a languages person, I was doing classical languages, I have done a lot of modern languages before that and I never expected to be in history. In fact, I had given up history at school because it was so boring. At that time, there was an experiment going on in British schooling system where they introduced us to very local history. But I wanted to know about the whole world and I was being forced to learn about interesting but local stories but I wanted to know a much bigger picture than that.

    It was only when I started studying in the university that I realised it was possible to do a kind of history that told you about people who were nothing like you. In school, the idea behind teaching us local history was so that they could help us to relate to people who came from the same place as us but what I suddenly realised at university through amazing teachers and great courses that actually what’s more amazing are the people who aren’t like us, the people who bring something new and different and that’s why I love teaching about Greece and Rome in the Classics Faculty at Oxford.

    I absolutely love teaching my students about the Greeks and Romans. Sometimes my students tend to think that the Greeks and Romans are quite similar to us-they kind of imagine that a Roman senator might be rather like a British politician or something. But I tell them that they were nothing like today’s people, these were very strange and different people. I think that’s so important for children at school in particular to learn that all these categories that we think of as being completely natural, whether it’s sexuality, nation, ethnicity, all sorts of preferences, were seen completely differently in the past and the people thought differently, saw themselves differently. I find that so liberating and the idea that you can say to kids, you think that the world you’re brought up in, that the categories you encounter, the way that your parents, your teachers live their lives, it gives you the parameters, you can only make choices within them, am I going to be you know go the majority way or do whatever is the kind of minority alternative and so on. I want to say to them you can completely rethink your lives, look at these people who are utterly different to you, see the world in completely different ways, you can take that and make the world you want to.

    Has the idea of God evolved through the history? Has the human mind evolved through the ages?

    I have yet in my career as a historian to see any evidence that the human mind has evolved over the ages (laughs), I’m afraid, I mean I wish it was different but I really don’t think so, I do have moments of revelation where, for instance, where you can see that the context has changed and this maybe explains a little bit about religion sometimes.

    So there was a moment when I went to visit some colleagues who were digging on a site at the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean Sea. It’s a beautiful Greek island, very deserted, importantly for this particular anecdote, quite remote and there’s not a lot of towns on Lemnos. It wasn’t the tourist season at the time. I remember going out the first evening, the sun had set, the stars were out and they were everywhere.

    I wasn’t just seeing the Milky Way, which you don’t see very often in England, or many places these days, but it was, the whole sky was carpeted with stars. In a way it wasn’t stars in the sky, it was stars and then tiny bits of black space in between them. A thought struck me that if I lived in a world before the invention of electricity and every time I looked in the sky after the sun went down, I saw this, then I might be maybe a little scared but also just very impressed with whatever it is that is creating that fact for me and this was a revelation for me because they I realized why all societies develop some kind of religion. I think the idea that there is something very powerful and strange beyond our reach and that’s just not available. But these days, we don’t even have time for these kind of revelations unfortunately, so in that sense the human mind has devolved.

    Did the mythic island of Atlantis exist in the ancient world?

    No. The truth is that the story of Atlantis was made up as a myth and it’s a very deliberate one, not a myth that grew up in time but was actually written down by the philosopher Plato in the 4th century BC and he specifically says, I am using this as an example, imagine if there was an island like this, so from the very beginning, it was supposed to be a non-existent thing, this enormous island in the Atlantic. He was using it to do some thought experiments about what if there was this kind of place that worked this sort of way, sort of utopian idea, but then what happened was people loved this idea so much, they wanted it to be real and so people started to say, well, what island was he thinking of and everyone forgot that he actually had specifically said this is not a real place, this is an imaginary place. So, I do, I love when people kind of try and say, oh, we finally found Atlantis, you know, this volcano or this, that and the other. It’s like, well, brilliant, but if you do then the person who made Atlantis up knew nothing about it. But it’s been such an interesting idea since, I’m so glad that he made it up and also that some people have kind of taken it more seriously than he intended because it’s very revealing what people say about Atlantis, where they imagine it, how they imagine it.

    When you study history as a subject, do you see any human behaviour repeating through out the ages?

    Yes, and then of course, one wants to leap to the very negative things, like somehow, we still managed to have war and so on, even though we have many examples of it not being very helpful.

    But on a positive note, I think there is a universal desire for connection and that is something that you can see over and over again in different societies, that no matter what the really physical barriers often to contact, to meeting other people and that kind of thing, the technological barriers and so on, people continue to overcome them. So, now there are many fewer physical or technological barriers to travelling around the earth and people want to go into space and people are imagining there might be aliens and so on to meet. So, I think there’s a that kind of desire to constantly expand the human horizon. I think it’s that something that repeats.

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on July 6, 2024.

  • The JLF that wasn’t

    It came, it happened and it went. This year’s JLF had all the right ingredients, the authors, the sessions and the venue. But then it still wasn’t the JLF we had all grown to love. Somewhere, the spice seems to be missing.

    ‘It has been one of the most spectacular festivals ever. We had very few drawbacks. There have been no dramas, no controversies. The authors have been astonishingly good,’ said William Dalrymple, author and director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. I wonder why he said that? Was it because the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024 has transformed into a ghost version of what it was some 4 years ago at Diggi Palace Hotel?
    The very words ‘Jaipur Literature Festival’ bring to my mind’s eye the very first JLF that I had attended in 2017. As they say, ‘the first impression is the last impression’ and so I was imprinted for life. The decorations and the entire look of original home of JLF, the Diggi Palace Hotel was about a celebration of not just literature but culture too. Not just the speakers or their books, but the atmosphere itself felt as if one had been transported to a magic land where nothing else mattered. You could fetch yourself some tea or coffee or some snacks and sit down and listen to the literati conversing about life, politics or anything else under the sun. Or you could just hop across to the lunch area where you would be sure to spot or bump into the likes of Shashi Tharoor or Shobha De or any other such stalwarts busy conversing with people or just enjoying their food. It was a setting which made the common folks believe that they could also hold intelligent conversations with all those ‘big’ writers and perhaps create a memory which would last them a life time of dinner parties and coffee conversations. Every year, as I would step into this world of JLF, I would leave behind my professional and personal woes at the entrance and enter into the wonderland that promised me intriguing tet-e-tats, interesting rendezvous and tasty memories. But then nothing lasts forever, does it? A thing of beauty is never a joy forever, is it?


    On the first day, as I drove into the gate of the make-shift parking of the Clarks Amer Hotel, I was stopped by a traffic police man and his assistant. He said, ‘the parking is full.’ I looked around, the parking was quite vacant except for a few cars. Besides those, there was an empty section had a board that read ‘festival vehicles only’. ‘There is a lot of space,’ I replied pointing to the empty spaces. ‘No, those are reserved for the other guests.’ I could see an empty space right in the front of the parking lot. ‘How about that space?’ I asked. ‘That is the colony’s space. We can’t park there.’ After a lot of discussion, he finally said, ‘okay, I will give you a space but it’s quite sandy. The vehicle which was parked there yesterday, got so mired in the sand that we had to call a crane and there are a lot of shrubs and thorny bushes, so your car tyres may get punctured but that will not be our fault’. I was getting late so I agreed to park, praying that I or the car tyres don’t meet the same fate. I chatted with him after parking my car and he told me that apparently there was some clash between the hotel management and the residents who believe that the parking lot belongs to them.
    I made my way to the entrance of JLF where volunteers were busy checking the attendees passes and guiding them to the venue of the festival. The minimum entrance fee was 200 rupees and upon the payment, those passes with the QR code were then sent to the attendee’s mobile which was then scanned by these volunteers. Someone had once said that knowledge should be free, which it was in the JLF of the yore. But today, things are different. However, youth activist and film maker Puneeta Roy feels differently. ‘I feel that this basic entry fee of 200 INR is just to discourage the selfie takers, the people who used to come to the festival just to take selfies or roam around. Moreover, now since no one can enter without an online registration, we at the Lit Fest are able to know the exact number of visitors at the literature festival at any given point in time. Now we see that the crowds that are coming in are a little more aware and there seem to be more readers.’


    However, Prashanth Kumar, a new attendee had a different take on the matter. ‘This was the first time I was attending JLF. I am from Hyderabad but I have been living in Jaipur for the past three years. I had heard a lot about it over the years so I was expecting that it will be a place where there will be books and authors I could interact with or talk with. However, in Clarks all I could see were these tents where some people were speaking on the dais while the others were listening to them. To me, it appeared that they were busy promoting their books. I saw youngsters taking selfies or eating or shopping at the numerous stalls. It felt like a festival alright but not a festival of books.’


    From the entrance to the different venues like the Baithak or the Charbagh or the front lawn was a long walk, every morning. On some days, some of those wore a desolate look as the speakers droned on to a few listeners who were more interested in their phones than the discussion at hand. Of course, the more popular sessions like those of Gulzar or Amish Tripathi or Devdutt Patnaik did attract the crowds but then that was expected, wasn’t it?

    I remembered the days when JLF was at the Diggi Palace Hotel. It was as if the whole Diggi Palace Hotel had become the Literature Festival. Anywhere on the venue, you could bump into Rampratap Diggi, the scion of the Diggi Palace and his entire clan decked up in their traditional attire. As Puneeta Roy puts it, ‘When you landed at the Diggi Palace Hotel, the impression one got was that they had arrived at a ‘Thakur’ abode. The entire family and the staff were completely involved in the festival. We used to arrive weeks before the festival and train the entire staff to ensure that we could maintain that aura of the festival. Here though Apurva and his family are involved, that involvement is a bit more subtle. We tried training the staff earlier but then this is a very busy hotel and the staff has to not just cater to the festival but also take care of the check-ins and the guests.’


    Perhaps, that’s where the difference lies. In Diggi Palace, it was only about the festival whereas in Clark’s, JLF is just one of the many activities that happen in the hotel which is why the very spirit of JLF is missing here.
    The earlier version of JLF or rather the pre-covid version of JLF was not just about book but also about celebrating the culture and cuisine of Rajasthan and perhaps even India. This time , it was strictly the books, at least for the common folks. As a media personnel, the spread that was laid out in lunch was disappointing. Each morning as I made my way to the lunch hall, I passed a bhelpuri vendor who prepared a better fare than that in the Clark’s. However, there is a small consolation – every second dish had a dash of spinach or some green leafy vegetable- which meant that I have eaten enough iron to qualify in the iron woman contest! For those who had to buy their food from various vendors also faced a similar problem. There weren’t enough tables and chairs to sit on or to eat. Once, it even started raining while we were in the middle of our fare and there was no place to go! But that was not the case with the privileged class. Food in the authors’ lounge or the friends of the festival lounge featured an array of delectable cuisine, that could be only afforded by the rich and the famous. A far cry from the days of Diggi where everyone could enjoy the same delicacies with every one!


    Speaking of queues, generally in a hotel like Clarks Amer, one would expect easily accessible washrooms. But that too wasn’t the case here. The washrooms had long queues. On the positive side, the women folk have undergone some evolution of sorts. In the long serpentine queues, they were patiently waiting for their turns.
    Frankly speaking , JLF is still a coveted festival. For most folks, it means a wonderland of experiences and knowledge. However, the image that is still alive in the hearts and minds of its lovers is that of Diggi’s JLF and not that of the event that happens in Clarks Amer. As one attendee remarked, ‘experiencing JLF earlier and now is like watching Madhubala in Mughal-e-Azam in her heydays and later watching her as she struggled with her heart disease and become a mere shell of the bombshell she was!

    This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on February 29, 2024.

  • @ Jaipur Literature Festival

    Shailaza Singh with Sharmishtha Mukherjee
    Shailaza Singh with Kai Bird
    Shailaza Singh with Nicholas Shakespeare
    Shailaza Singh with Devdutt Patnaik
    Shailaza Singh with Maria Goretti
    Shailaza Singh with Anand Neelkanthan
    Shailaza Singh with Amish Tripathi
    Shailaza Singh with Nancy Silberkliet
    Shailaza Singh with Albert Read
    Shailaza Singh with Malcolm Turnbull

    The last few days have been so much about meeting and talking to different stalwarts and authors at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024. These people are amazing!