NOT ALL LIT FESTS ARE EQUAL

For the longest time, Janet de Neefe and I did a 'shall we, shall we not' head to the Kitab Lit Fest in Bombay/Mumbai? Sure, we'd had our dose of the sub-continent at the Galle Lit Fest in January but Kitab sounded sorely tempting. That was till we learnt that Kiran Desai - whose mug stayed on the front page of the website for the longest time was not going there, nor was MJ Akbar, whose name appeared on another panel. Then another panel had one moderator and eight panelists - wonder what they said in the span of an hour. All of this meant - take your chances.

In this brilliant report, Jerry Pinto pens an intensely personal account of the festivities or lack thereof:

"In the morning, the discussion on the veil was equally arbitrary. Everyone spoke about veils. Except for Kamila Shamsie, no one made any sense. A feminist friend was startled by the complete arbitrariness of the remarks. “Did they come for a holiday?” she asked. "

Looks like we missed nothing.