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SECOND ANNUAL IAAC LITERARY FESTIVAL
in collaboration with Hunter College, CUNY, 625 Park Ave, NYC
OCTOBER 22-25, 2015 |
| Reviews |
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Vol. XIV, No. 167, November 2015
The Second Annual Lit Fest Adds Another Plume to IAAC’s Cap
By M.P. PRABHAKARAN |
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Picture Left: Novelist Salman Rushdie, NYU Professor Suketu Mehta and Vassar College Professor Amitav Kumar, on the opening night of the IAAC Lit Fest 2015 (Picture credit: Shashwat Gupta/IAAC). Picture Right: Screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, Moviemaker Mira Nair and IAAC Executive Director Aroon Shivdasani, on the closing night (Picture credit: Sangeeta Jain/IAAC).
With the recently concluded three-day literary festival in New York, the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC) has added another plume to its cap. It has been wearing the well-deserved cap, as a leading promoter of India’s culture in the United States, for a long time now.
Until last year, its activities in the area of literature were limited to launching of new books on India-related topics, by Indians and non-Indians alike. It hosted book-launching events several times a year in the past 18 years. How did the annual literary festival come about? Aroon Shivdasani, the IAAC’s president and executive director, has the answer: “Last fall, we had an epiphany and decided a Lit Fest was definitely a much more cohesive way of giving both veteran and emerging authors a platform to tell their stories to an extremely receptive audience hungry for personal connections” to them.
The lit fest Shivdasani and her team of volunteers put together at Hunter College of the City University of New York, from October 23 to 25, proved to be true to those words. If Shivdasani could call last year’s festival “a roaring success,” she can justifiable describe the one held this year in more superlative terms. That’s the impression this reporter came away with after attending the three-day festival.
It covered every literary genre. It assembled an array of panelists who could talk authoritatively on the topics assigned to them. They consisted of authors, well-known and not-so-well-known, literary agents and publishers’ representatives. The audiences, mostly from the Indian Diaspora in New York and surrounding areas, were, indeed, “extremely receptive” to what the panelists had to say. Aspiring authors got valuable tips on how to get their books published and, when published, how to get them publicized. On a personal note, after listening to those with inside knowledge of the publishing world, this struggling author realized why he ended up collecting all those rejection slips from publishers and how to avoid receiving them in the future.
The festival got kicked off a day earlier, on October 22, with the launching of Mudhur Jaffrey’s latest book on Indian cooking, Vegetarian India: A Journey Through the Best of Indian Home Cooking. Madhur Jaffrey needs no introduction to those who are familiar with Indian cinema and writings on Indian cooking. She has won numerous awards as an actress and her cookbooks have won the prestigious James Beard Award seven times.
The James Beard Awards, established in 1990 by the James Beard Foundation of New York, are considered the “Oscars of Food” industry. The cookbooks written by Ms. Jaffrey are largely instrumental in bringing Indian cooking into Western kitchens. The Independent newspaper of Britain called her the “godmother of Indian cooking.” Her talk at the festival, on her long journey from acting to culinary writing, spiced up with anecdotes from her life, was a good warmup to the actual festival that began the next day. The actual festival also featured another model-turned-actress-turned cookbook writer, Padma Lakshmi.
The festival opened with a conversation between Salman Rushdie and Suketu Mehta, moderated by Amitav Kumar. Sir Salman Rushdie, author of 12 novels and four nonfiction works, has won several literary awards. The most prestigious of them are the Man Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers prize. He won both for his novel Midnight’s Children, which was made into a movie three years ago by the Canada-based Indian moviemaker Deepa Mehta. Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), raised in London and moved to New York in 2001. Bombay figures prominently in many of his books.
Suketu Mehta was born in Kolkata, raised in Bombay and now lives in New York. He is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. He is also an award-winning writer. His widely-acclaimed book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found won the Kiriyama Prize. Needless to say, the book is all about Bombay.
Amitav Kumar, professor of English at Vassar College, New York, is also a writer in his own right.
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| “Bombay Boys in New York” |
The attachment of Rushdie and Mehta to Bombay and New York may have been the reason why the organizers of the festival decided to present the opening event featuring them as “Bombay Boys in New York.” Their conversation was spiced up with their experiences in the two cities. They also read excerpts from their books: Mr. Rushdie, from his recently published novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights; and Mr. Mehta, from the book on cities around the world he is currently working on.
According to Mr. Mehta, “Writers are obsessed with complex cities because we are obsessed with the complex people in them.” There are 350 million people living in other countries, he said, and their experiences needed to be told. He also said that the best writing about cities are done by outsiders. The story of New York is being told not by native New Yorkers, Mehta added, but by immigrants like Kiran Desai, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri and Gary Steyngart.
Such remarks were particularly appealing to those in the audience, which consisted mostly of writers and aspiring writers. Barring a handful, they were either immigrants or immigrants’ children. Rushdie said that he had once “wrongly guessed” about the future of Indian writing in English. He had feared “that it would go downhill.” (Years ago, this reporter also had the same fear.) He was very happy, he added, that “instead, it went amazingly uphill.”)
A member of the audience shared with Rushdie the sad reality that many wonderful books published in India’s regional languages, which have profound wisdom in them, go largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. If only someone could translate them into English, they could get the recognition they deserve, he added. Maybe because he didn’t present his point well, Rushdie couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer. It was his hope that the IAAC would one day become resourceful enough to invite some of those regional-language authors to its annual lit fest so their works would be known beyond their native regions. An added advantage of such a gesture would be that the IAAC Lit Fest would come across as non-elitist.
Getting back to this year’s lit fest, the two “Bombay Boys” regaled the audience with jokes and anecdotes and set the right tone for the events to follow in the next two days. At panel discussions that took place in the next two days, established writers shared with audiences the frustrations they experienced in their journeys, especially in a field that was not yet accustomed to Indians writing in English. Even R.K. Narayan appeared to be an oddity in the U.S., one panelist said. Novices among writers who attended panel discussions learned the ropes of the publishing industry and of what mistakes to avoid in their efforts to get their books published. By the way, “Learning the Ropes of the Industry” was the title of one of the sessions.
One session which writers who are struggling to get some name recognition found particularly useful was “Publicizing Books Thru Social media,” presented by Sree Sreenivasan. Sreenivasan, formerly a professor of journalism, dean of student affairs and chief digital officer, in that order, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is now the chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. His expertise in the field of social media has earned him the nickname the “Social Media Guru.”
He taught the up-and-coming writers in the audience how to take advantage of social media to publicize their books. It’s important that the book be good, he said. Write, rewrite and re-rewrite until you get it perfect, he added. But it’s equally important that the book be brought to the attention of as wide an audience as possible. Creating a website and posting on it all information about the author and the book was an important first step toward that, he said.
Sreenivasan then walked the audience through the process of building a website; and then of bringing the website to the attention of others. In this digital age, he said, the best way to connect with people is through social media – email, Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In etc. A book tour might bring in just 20 people into the room, he added, and most of them might have come because it was raining outside. A website could attract thousands.
Everyone who attended Sreenivasan’s talk left the room with a deep sense of gratitude for him.
The finale of the festival featured famous film producer and director Mira Nair and award-winning screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, in conversation with filmmaker and professor, Henry Bean. The conversation was mostly about the preparations that are under way to turn Nair’s hugely popular movie Monsoon Wedding into a Broadway play. Dhawan, who made her screenwriting debut with Monsoon Wedding, is also writing the script for the play. The play is scheduled to be staged in next September, Ms. Nair told the audience.
The IAAC Lit Fest is still in its infancy. But going by the enthusiasm and support it has generated in just over a year, one can see it fast attaining the stature of the IAAC’s flagship annual event, the New York Indian Film Festival. The Second Lit Fest is something Aroon Shivdasani and her dedicated team of volunteers can be proud of.
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| (Published on November 3, 2015) |
| (Readers are invited to comment. Send the comments to letters@eastwestinquirer.com ) |
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