14 minutes of fame

As mentioned earlier, I was at the India Habitat Centre on the evening of Friday, December 14th as a participant at the Young Writers programme that was part of the ongoing Delhi International Arts Festival. It was also my birthday that day. I turned 32, an age some of you might find too advanced for me to be considered as a young writer! Anyway, the other two participants, Amandeep Sandhu (Sepia Leaves) and Advaita Kala (Almost Single), are around that age too, so I guess that’s ok.

So there were the three of us, and Shrabani Basu, author of Spy Princess, and Nafisa Ali up on the dias in the Stein Auditorium for nearly two hours. I hadn’t prepared a talk, so I fumbled up there, the reading we had to do went better (I read from pp.47–51 of my book), and I managed to get a few laughs during the Q&A round at the end. Surprisingly, I was told my performance was pretty good.

Thanks to all the people who turned up, especially my friends and relatives—and as for those of you who didn’t turn up, I expect you to do so next time, though I have no idea where or when that may be! Here’s the Indian Express’s story on the programme. Anuj Bahri, who some of you might remember from an earlier post of mine, later took a small group of us up to the Habitat Centre bar on the sixth floor for drinks after the event. The perks of being an author you see. The actual birthday party was a get-together at a friend’s place on Saturday night; they told me I would have to do a reading for them too, but thankfully I was spared!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shillong and northeast India, and who might have thought of it as this otherworldly place after reading my Scorpions post, here’s a reminder that the simmering frustration and resentment found all over today’s India is present in my part of the country too. The events described in the linked article took place in Guwahati, just 100 kilometres from Shillong, 18 days before the Scorpions’ concert. The rally in Guwahati, the concert in Shillong: two different worlds.