Reading for our times

The Hyderabad Literary Festival is a truly local mela, mixed in with the flavours of other regions of the country and of course the world. In this episode, we speak to some of the many who have participated in the festival in different ways, from organizing it to funding it to bringing in the books and art and discussion, to simply reveling in it.

Featured in the episode are:

Jayesh Ranjan, Festival Director and Principal Secretary, Industries & Commerce and Information Technology, Government of Telangana

Sadhana Ramchander, Editor, and Founder, Blue Pencil Infodesign

Kalpana Kannabiran, Sociologist and Legal Scholar, Director, Central for Social Development

Aparna Rayaprol, Professor, Department of Sociology and Trustee, Rayaprol Literary Trust

Seetha Anand Vaidyam, Early Childhood Educator

Serish Nanisetti, Journalist and Author

Uday Rao, Orient Blackswan Limited

Every year in the last week of January, Hyderabad hosts its own literary festival, a variegated celebration of books, cinema, art, theatre, poetry...in short, all things cultural. But not just cultural. There’s also a good dose of environment, civic discourse, and of course, street food and Irani chai. This year, though, the festival will be online, and while we will of course miss the charm of sitting under the trees and spending three days basking in the pleasures of literature and the imagination, the show will go on. In this special episode of Reading for Our Times, I speak with the four directors of the Hyderabad Literary Festival about the 2021 iteration—the challenges it brings, and the promise it still has to create “social togetherness” not just for those in the city, but everywhere on the Internet where there is a love of culture.

In all the uncertainty and anxiety  of 2020, we continued to find sustenance, refuge, learning and enjoyment in books. On walls, they lent gravitas to Zoom calls, and contributed to year-end Christmas cheer as they danced into tree-like piles. But most of all, they lent warmth to the hands and delight to the eyes and mind, whether on the backlit screens of kindles or in varied font on creamy rag.

In this special episode of Reading for our Times, a few readers look back at their year in books—what they meant, what they gave, and why reading is for all time.

Here’s a list of books featured in the episode:

A Memory of Light (Book 11 in The Wheel of Time Series) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

The Goldfinch by Donna Tart

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

To the Lake by Kapka Kassabova

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Beastly Tales from Here and There by Vikram Seth

A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer

Vesper Flights by Helen McDonald

Farthest Field by Raghu Karnad

The Spirit of Indian Painting by B N Goswami

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

This episode takes us on a sporting journey—on and off the field and track, inside the minds and lives of athletes known and unknown, as well as those who write about them. We have a great cast of readers, many of whom are rather well known sports writers and sports persons, people who have been immersed in the field. This genre, I’m discovering, is as much about the magic of what happens in formal and informal arenas as about the dynamics—the politics--that permeate broader social and cultural life. The readings offer some glimpses into the breadth of this genre.

Books featured in this episode:

Born to Run: the hidden tribe, the ultra runners and the greatest race the world has never seen by Christopher Mcdougall (read by Karunya Keshav)

Ten for Sixty Six and all that by Arthur Mailey (read by S Giridhar)

Playing with Fire by Nasser Hussain (read by Ananya Upendran)

The Test by Nathan Leamon (read by Shikha Pandey)

What’s my Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States by David Zirin (read by Sharda Ugra)

Books have a way of getting into our DNA, burrowing deep into the way we see the world, our place in it, and the possibilities of change or the complexities of acceptance. In this episode, writer and media analyst Achala Upendran curates a set of readings that were chosen because of their formative role in one's worldview, or because they opened up a different way of seeing.

Books featured in the episode:

1. Matilda, Roald Dahl (read by Anuja Vaidya)

2. A Little Princess, Francis Hodgson Burnett (read by Priyanka Mookerjee)

3. The Giver, Lois Lowry (read by Shreya Jindal)

4. The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly (read by Achala Upendran)

5. A Two Toned Tale, Bonophool (read by Ramona Sen)

7. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (read by Neha Vaddadi)

8. If This is a Man, Primo Levi (read by Tarini Mookerjee)

Some of the readers are writers too! Do check out their books:

This week’s episode features an interview with the writer Alan Lightman and a short reading from his book, Einstein’s Dreams. Alan Lightman is the author of several books that traverse the spaces of science fiction, spiritualism and philosophy, and the conversation reflects his journey across these domains.

The interview was first aired as part of a series called "Caught in Passing" on the University of Hyderabad's Campus Community Radio station, Bol Hyderabad, in 2017. It’s a few years on, and in the intervening period Alan has written a few more books, including, in 2018, In Praise of Wasting Time, something that is particularly relevant to our modern overworked, overscheduled lives, thrown into such disarray by the pandemic and the resulting lockdown.

Books by Alan Lightman mentioned in the episode

Einstein’s Dreams (2004, Vintage)

Song of Two Worlds (2017, Red Hen Press)

In Praise of Wasting Time (2018, TED Books)

The Diagnosis (2002, Vintage)

In today’s episode we bring you extracts from a clutch of works that may be called classics. Some for the sheer power of their words and their layered depiction of humanity. Others because they’ve provoked us to discomfort—with ourselves and the social order. The six readings presented today come from very personal choices picked from the large ocean of what we may call classic literature. And from very personal definitions of the classic. We have Marlowe and Bronte, Nobokov and Sreelal Shukla, Ray Bradbury and James Baldwin—the last a searing epistle that seems particularly relevant today.

Work featured in the episode:

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (read by Anjali Lal Gupta)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (read by Usha Raman)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (read by Ram Ramaswamy)

Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla (read by Varsha Tiwari)

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (read by Rebecca Mathai)

My Dungeon Shook by James Baldwin (read by Sita Reddy)

The episode was co-curated by Sita Reddy.

In this episode, Suroor Alikhan, host of the blog Talking about Books, takes us on a global reading tour. The six excerpts featured in the episode are by writers  from different regions of the world, from Argentina to Angola, from Jamaica to Poland, opening the page to very different literary traditions.

The books featured in this episode are:

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)

Go went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (Germany)

Bestiarios by Julio Cortazar (Argentina)

The Lunatic by Anthony C Winkler (Jamaica)

The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa (Angola)

The Book of Masks by Hwan Sun-won (South Korea)