It was a packed day at the Mountain Echoes Lit fest and most eyes were on two women wearing Bhutanese traditional dresses.
One was the Queen Mother of Bhutan, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, in a fuschia silk Kira, and the other Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje, in a pink one. Both are royals, one is almost a demigod and the other is now an elected representative. The Kira, one volunteer whispers, easily costs more than Rs 1 lakh.
In the first session of the day, named ‘On Her Majesty’s Bookshelf’, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck talked about her two-year-old grandson who, she said, is a reincarnation of a Rinpoche, ‘the great messenger’ himself.
The prince has become a monk now, just like one in every hundred Bhutanese.
“Once he started speaking, he told us who he was,” she gushes as any grandmother of a reincarnate would. She said they send him to a monastery because he knows too much.
In Bhutan, the tales of kings largely sound like fables, and any questioning of the revered royals is declined in the most polite manner.
Posters of the young royal couple can be seen across the city of Thimpu. Even at a drug rehabilitation centre, the royal couple smiles over the bed of the patients, stuck on a chipped green wall and placed next to motivational posters.
We met a young man of 20 on our flight back to New Delhi, who was having a tiny panic attack because of the size of the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
As we walked across, he showed me his scholarship badge. He had met the queen mother during the naming ceremony of the new prince. She had liked his painting so much that she told him that he never would have to worry about his education and job. Incidentally his Facebook profile picture is of the Queen Mother and the baby prince, which he says is not uncommon.
Vivek Roy is now a proud student of Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he probably should worry. Sorry, I digress, back to ‘Mountain Echoes’.
‘The Loss As Gain’ session with Pavan K Varma, former ambassador of India to Bhutan and currently a sitting MP in Rajya Sabha for JD(U), was primarily about the adaptation of his book into a Bollywood film of the same name.
The film was shot in Bhutan with an Indian and Bhutanese crew. Tabu, seated in the front row, became the prime suspect once the moderator hinted that some of the crew might be present in the room.
Actor Kelly Dorji (you may remember him as Lara Dutta’s ex-boyfriend) is also Bhutan’s most famous celebrity, according to a journalist with the country’s only TV news channel.
Even ‘bhai’ Salman Khan was second to him in popularity among young teens I met outside a cinema hall. He moderated two sessions on Day 3, the first being a one-on-one conversation with Tabu.
The actor reminisced about how ridiculous she thought acting was when she was asked to walk down the stairs in a gown smiling but was not allowed to look down.
No matter how rich or poor you were, every Bollywood movie in those days had a flight of stairs.Tabu, Bollywood Actress
As two grey-haired gentleman from the audience (one being Padma Shri Piyush Pandey) asked her about acting in Cheeni Kum, Dorjey quipped about everyone thinking they have a chance with Tabu, to which pat came the reply “Not until you’re Amitabh Bachchan.”
The conversation veered towards more serious grounds of secularism, terrorism and in the session, ‘Present Tense : Understanding our Times’, moderated by Patrick French. Bangladeshi poet, writer and director of Dhaka Literature Fest Sadaf Saaz, spoke of how we give more strength to ISIS by calling it radical Islam and about how Islam shouldn’t be THE problem while discussing global terrorism.
Interestingly, the other woman on the panel was Turkish writer Ciler Ilhan, whose nation, much like Saaz’s Bangladesh, is currently in turmoil. “I don’t think Turkey would be radicalised,” she said when asked about Syrian refugees.
Things are changing in Turkey. They will start voting and things are already changing economically as there is, sorry to say, cheap labour.
After an awkwardly placed session on food aesthetics with Amita Bambawale, on which discussions on the colour scheme on your dining table and the mood it evokes took place, we were back with Bhutan’s Salman Khan.
During ‘The Trekking Trails of Bhutan’, Kelly Dorji shifted gears to become a tourism mascot, listing out a host of hidden, off-beat trails around the kingdom.
Then came two back to back sessions on identity — ‘Walking Towards Ourselves’ and ‘I for Identity’.
Ira Trivedi, board member of the Truly Madly app, which she called the Tinder of India, talked about how they have hired a person to photoshop pictures of clients. She said they have said good bye to the ‘You be you’ mantra on how women should strive for inner beauty and not outward glamour.
Turkish author Ciler Ilhan spoke of the difference between journalists and writers, “We (writers) have an active imagination... we put nice lies in stories.”
The day ended with the last session on ‘Global city’, where Pico Iyer in conversation with Patrick French talked about how he felt like an outsider as a young boy living in a British neighbourhood. But now, he said, in a Chicken Tikka Masala-loving UK, he’s at home.
The conversation hopped all around the world, including North Korea, which Iyer said looks just like Vegas.
And with that, three days of books, banter, Buddhism and Bands in Bhutan was over.
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