If you are in Mumbai this weekend, it’s hard to have missed the buzz and excitement of the Tata litfest celebrating books, stories, and the power of words. India’s biggest obsession, the Cricket World Cup is underway, and the pollution levels are peaking but none of that deterred the millions who joined in the 14th edition of the litfest spread across 5 days.
Albus Dumbledore, in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, says, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.” And… magic it is at the NCPA and St Paul’s Institute – the venues for The Mumbai Litfest. The 5-day extravaganza kickstarted with a talk with the man who said, “I am the total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done to me,” – Salman Rushdie
Rushdie started his chat concerning his latest ‘timeless masterpiece’, Victory City. He recounted how the “germ of this novel was sitting in his mind for a very long time” and related to his memories of the times when he visited the picturesque and timeless masterpieces of Hampi way back in the 1970s. No point in guessing but as Rushdie said and most of us who read Victory City can feel on almost every page, it was “quite an enjoyable book to write.”
Perhaps the author himself best encapsulated Victory City best when he said, “Everything people think I made up is true and everything people think is true that I made up…”
What’s coming next? Well, that would surely interest and excite his fans across the world. Rushdie says, “I am trying to write a book on the thing that happened,” and points to his eye and the ghastly attack… “I just think that until I have dealt with that I can’t do anything else.” “Stay tuned,” says the master of words, and stay tuned would be what we would say to you too for continuous coverage of all the highlights from the 5-day literary extravaganza that took the ‘Maximum City’ by storm.
