Some one-liners, some thoughts: Jaipur Literature Festival
After my first experience at the Jaipur Literature Festival ( 2017 edition ) a friend called and asked if it was about fun ( read food ), glamour ( read wardrobe ) or books ( read buying, reading, knowing, listening to and interacting with authors ). It is about all of this and more, you need to savour the experience once, get a feel of the scale and fervour, and develop your own understanding of the festival. A friend says we are a nation of melas, and this is a wonderful one! Not very easy to choose favourites in such scenario but if I had to pick two threads it would be the books on history and one liners. It was story-telling at its finest and changed the way I understood history could be discussed. Suzannah Lipscomb talked of ‘The lovers who changed history’ and Giles Milton of ‘The spice trader who changed history’. The later, to quote William Dalrymple, “a master class in history”. What I share (and discuss) below are one-liners that I came across and that stayed...