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When Stephen Fry spoke about Wilde and left JLF in tears

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Jairaj Singh
Jairaj SinghJan 23, 2016 | 20:40

When Stephen Fry spoke about Wilde and left JLF in tears

In my wrap of the day two of Jaipur Literature Festival, I asked, can this be a non-controversial year for the lit fest? How quickly I was proved wrong. Shortly after the story was published, senior editors of India Today called and informed me that Karan Johar's views on how he finds that there's "no freedom of speech in India" and that "democracy is a joke", which were made here the other day, has kicked up a storm.

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It hasn't helped that Union minister Gen VK Singh, who has a penchant for offering distasteful sound bites, reportedly told journalists in Jodhpur that "they should go beat him [Karan Johar] up." Let the madness begin...

- It's day three of JLF. It's a Saturday, if it wasn't already crowded so far, today feels particularly overwhelming. Of course, everyone is here to see Kajol who is in conversation with Ashwin Sanghi, author of The Sialkot Saga.

Kajol looks stunning, naturally, with her hair tied back. She admits a few times in the session that she hasn't read the book, but it's a blockbuster. It isn't to say she hasn't read his other work. When asked which character she would like to play from his books, she says "Chanakya" from Chanakya's Chant.

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Kajol in conversation with Ashwin Sanghi.

Sharing a bit about her own voracious appetite for books, she says: "When my husband [Ajay Devgn] asked me to marry him I said I'll only marry you if you give me a library like in Beauty and The Beast."

- Perhaps I shouldn't have sounded so snooty about the previous event, I hear telling myself. What was most people's morning's starry-eyed moment with Kajol was mine watching Stephen Fry, one of Britain's finest comics, in person.

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Fry walks on stage and takes a picture of the jam-packed audience. He's witty, intelligent and fascinating, he has everyone hanging on to every single word of his. It is apparent.

Fry opens with making a playful jibe at his school friend and long-time acting colleague Hugh Laurie: "Such an astonishing person and so much promise. You wonder what went wrong. Last I heard he was at a hospital in LA." (Laurie plays an American doctor in House.) "We fell in love, in a comic way," he says, on meeting him first in Cambridge.

From impersonating Rowan Atkinson to talking about JK Rowling ("Rolling, not Row-ling", he tells the moderator, "you're fired"), and how he had a problem reading a line in the third Harry Potter book - "Harry pocketed it". When he asked Rowling if she could possibly change the line, she said "no". She went to on add that same line in her next four books, he tells us, just to spite him.

- The Global Novel session soon morphed into an animated discussion over whether television viewing is taking over the allure of reading a novel. Critic and writer Aleksandar Hemon spoke about American TV shows like Sopranos and The Wire and how "no novel comes close" to them.

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"The monopoly of the novel in engaging with people's lives has diminished," he says.

Margaret Atwood was not amused: "One thing that novel can do is that it can take you into the reality of the time it has been written in... From a neurological point of view, more of the brain lights up when you read a novel than when you are watching TV."

She also didn't spare Booker nominee Sunjeev Sahota, who was trying to make a complicated point of why he writes and how reading is "like exercising a muscle". Atwood cuts in and asks: "Would you still write a novel if only one person reads it?"

- A young girl asked Salman Khurshid at his book launch about why Congress has become all about Rahul and Sonia, the Gandhi dynasty. There was wild applause. The moderator butted in. He didn't answer.

- Two girls taking a selfie in front of Random Penguin House book stall are trying to get the beautiful leather bound books in the frame. "But do you even read?" Asks the friend, looking at the girl who's pouting while holding her camera phone.

- A senior journalist was headed to hear Margo Jefferson, the winner of Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and was astounded to find the Mughal Tent filled to the brim, with no place even to stand and even listen. The author of Negroland was to discuss "authenticity and identity in the context of race". He was mightily impressed, till he learnt that the particular session has been cancelled and the crowd was there to listen to Javed Akhtar discussing literature versus cinema.

- When confronted with terminally-ill patients, enquiring about options with the clinician, what should one do? Being Mortal author, Atul Gawande, says his colleague would call him an "explanaholic doctor". "I would spend 95 minutes with my patients explaining the facts of the situation, the options, the pros and cons. And in the very end, I would say, now what do you want to do? And they would say, what should I do, doctor? And I would go like, no, no, no... it's not my choice, it's yours." Gawande feels that a clinician should give all the options, but the ultimate choice is both a life decision and not just a medical one.

- Stephen Fry was delightfully candid talking about himself, in a session on Oscar Wilde. "To bullies (in school) I used to say, 'No, no, no, don't hit me. You'll give me an erection.'"

On the famous playwright and wit, he said, "He was the prime minister of Bohemia. His writing was like sex." Stephen Fry left most in the crowd in tears. He spoke about how two years ago Wilde's tombstone was restored. The polished surface had got corroded by people kissing it.

"If only he could come back alive, just for five minutes." Fry got a standing ovation. And then he made everyone laugh, imitating Winston Churchill. He's the only one I have seen at JLF so far getting a second standing ovation.

- The author of Capital, Thomas Piketty, the "rockstar economist", gave an impassioned speech, extrapolating on his pet theme of inequality. "Extreme inequality has the risk of leading to violence. It is important, particularly in a country like India, to reflect on this."

He also urged the elite (the rich) to open their wallet to remove social inequalities. India, he feels, is not transparent. "Ten years ago India passed the RTI Act, but paradoxically stopped publishing income tax statistics." But it's not all a tale of caution: "At least India has tried in an imperfect way to address inequality through its public reservation policy."

- Overheard Urvashi Butalia saying, "The topic is the same, inequality, except I don't know how much Thomas Piketty will talk about gender."

Last updated: January 24, 2016 | 14:55
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