JLF Day 3: Liberalism, Chronicling Death & Passions of the Tongue

Day three at the Jaipur Lit Fest saw some very engaging sessions beginning with Salman Khurshid.

This is a country where one high court judge issued an order to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I hope India becomes more liberal. It should be like the Jaipur Literary Festival everywhere.

Salman Khurshid, Former External Affairs Minister

And there couldn’t have been a better note to begin day 3 with, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Salman Khurshid’s interaction with Barkha Dutt, at the launch of his book, The Other Side of The Mountain turned out to be a really engaging session.

Dutt threw a volley of questions at Khurshid about the trajectory of the Congress party. Khurshid spoke at length about Manmohan Singh, highlighting sections from his book, where he shared anecdotes about our former prime ministers.

For example, at a meeting between Singh and Nawaz Sharif in late September 2013, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the then Indian prime minister reportedly told his Pakistani counterpart,

Mian Saheb, no Indian Prime Minister can sign away Kashmir, and nor can I. Subject to that, the sky is the limit.

Khurshid had no qualms in admitting that his party made quite a few mistakes in the past, and also asserted that the Congress is doing a lot of groundwork to outperform itself in the coming elections.

Chasing Death

“We have medicalised the story of mortality.”

Primarily a surgeon, Atul Gawande has been writing for a long time on healthcare in the US. His book, Being Mortal outlines the stories of patients and families Gawande met, across the globe.

For most of human history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn’t matter whether you were five or fifty – every day was a roll of the dice. But now, as medical advances push the boundaries of survival further each year, we have become increasingly detached from the reality of being mortal. So here is a book about the modern experience of mortality – about what it’s like to get old and die, how medicine has changed this and how it hasn’t, where our ideas about death have gone wrong.

Atul Gawande, Surgeon and Author of Being Mortal

Talking about medicine, life and art, Gawande outlined his tryst with mortality, which as a surgeon he shares a rather unforgiving relationship with. He also emphasised that the story of the last century is that of a transformation – the fact that how human lifespans have extended, and people get to grow old before succumbing to inevitable death.

Tongue Tied

In a fascinating reading session, authors Yoko Tawada and Abdourahman A Waberi read out excerpts from their works. Both Waberi and Tawada have a fascinating relationship with language. While Waberi’s mother tongue is Somali, he writes in French. Tawada writes in Japanese and German.

In both of their works, language is both an enabler and perpetrator of violence. In The Naked Eye, Tawada’s protagonist lands up in alien lands, and her inability to speak any of those languages proves fatalistic. Yet a foreign language, French, also makes her fall in love – with Catherine Deneuve, as she starts watching French films.

When I find a word to express a certain emotion, or feeling, lacking in one language, in another, it intrigues me.

Yoko Twada, Author of The Naked Eye

For Waberi, his stay in France, and also the fact that people in Djibouti, where he hails from, primarily speak French – a colonial imposition – French became the language of expression. It is interesting to note that in India, we also share a similar relationship with English – the coloniser’s language appropriated and used then to write back to the empire.

Day 3 at the JLF decidedly made one aware of the importance of continuing dialogues, the immensely essential task of promoting multi-linguality, and the strange relationship we share with language.