Jaipur Literature Festival — Whorehouse of Writers & Selfie-Junkies

I’m fitter than the pole-dancing spanish strippers & south delhi street bitches, so when on the night of 12^th January ’23, I had a [Google-verified] heart attack, it surprised me more than when my ex-fiancé sold her engagement ring to buy a Sabyasachi lehenga & dumped me for a klepto-alcoholic-bipolar lezzie. But BetterThanGod-Google had fucked up — I had acid reflux, not a heart attack. Google-promoted YouTube doctors recommended me a diet that declared all foods & drinks toxic-as-AmberHeard barring hot-ginger water & skinny-milk oats.

After 7 days of ICU diet, I woke up at 4am, didn’t shower, boarded the 6am train, with Örlã, to Jaipore. What I like about Örlã is her forrestgumplikecuriosity and childlikesugarrush. But it also means Örlã, if not tied-to-a-tree, is highly likely to disappear, trespass, pulldownherpants, or hop in a Fiat with a pedophile if he lures her with a cloud of cottoncandy. It was a risk to tag her along, but she is almost the last person who doesn’t hate me [yet], so I thought, why not.

After chucking our bags on the dingy hotel bed, we ran [in a cab] to a fancy hotel — Clarks. That’s where JLF has moved from Diggi Palace. As we walked in, Javed Akhtar was telling the same old stale stories at the Front Lawn, which was more crowded than a barely18 Russian hooker’s vajayjay in a Roman orgy. To save ourselves from a highly-possible instantaneous death-by-stampede, we flew far away from Akhtar & landed in Mughal Tent, where desi authors were trash-talking China while wearing made in China—Casio, Chanel, Cartier, Converse, & Condoms. They blamed China for pocketless girl’s dresses, Avatar’s crappy storyline, flat pitches in Rawalpindi, Dunkin Donut’s failure in India, Nathu shooting Gandhi, Enrique Iglesias’s tiny penis, One Direction’s break-up, Kim-Kanye’s divorce, Elvis Presley’s death & Harry-Meghan behaving like total cunts. 

Shrabani Basu chirped on about her book: The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [Sherlock Holmes’ creator] solves a real-life criminal case against George Edalji, accused of killing whorses in England in 1903 after Jack the Ripper was killing whores in 1888. In May 1907, Edalji was acquitted — Verdict: He was wrongly accused as he was a brown Parsi boy. Don’t you love good ol’ racism?

Kinshuk supergay Gupta, writer of Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chordarwaja, the first modern Hindi LGBTQIA+ short story collection, had far less hair than his video playing on the stage’s big screen.

Fun Fact: Kinshuk has fewer Twitter followers than I do. And I’ve 88 followers. Ha!

Geetanjali Shree, whose Hindi novel, रेत समाधि (Tomb of Sand), translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize in 2022, was such a godawfully dull orator on a panel that also had Anamika, who spoke so seductively, in both English & Hindi, that it gave everyone, including the birds, instant orgasms.

I will take a moment to type a big fuck you to all the double-barrelled last-name feminist writers at JLF. 

Aditi Maheshwari-Goyal + Chitra Banerjee-Divakaruni + Manreet Sodhi-Someshwar + Sunita Pant-Bansal + Urmimala Sarkar-Munsi + Vandana Saxena-Poria.

Do these Woke dumbcunts not recognize the ‘simple fact’ that the last name they refuse to drop after getting married is also their father’s, not their mother’s? 

I really hope all your sons & daughters bang each other & get married. And their sons & daughters follow suit to eventually have twelve-barrelled last names like Mōnälisâ Banerjee-Divakaruni-Sodhi-Someshwar-Pant-Bansal-Sarkar-Munsi-Saxena-Poria-Maheshwari-Goyal.

Be Adele, Be Beyoncé, Be Shakira, Be Madonna, Be Anamika — Fuck the Lastnames. 

Manil Suri, born in Bombay, professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, US, since 1983, still made the mistake that 99.91% of Indians make. 

Fun Fact: A, B, C are letters, not alphabets. Alphabet [not Alphabets] is a set of 26 letters: A to Z.

Amitabh Kant, ex-NITI Aayog CEO, was by far the most patriotic speaker. For him, India is the greatest country that can do no wrong. I wonder if he has ever heard that 1 million babies die of hunger every year in India, a country where just the food thrown away at weddings each year can feed 100 million babies.

Great German cinematographer & pioneer of cinematography in India [1903-1967], Josef Wirsching’s grandsons Josef Wirsching [yes, same name] & Georg Wirsching launched the nostalgic photobook ‘Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema.’ I couldn’t care less about the book, but Örlã & I were stunned that both the grandsons not only spoke in Indian English, they also looked totally Indian. Örlã meticulously stalked the Wirsching family tree on the Holy Internet but didn’t find any parent of Indian origin. This means just one thing: Josef & Georg’s mother had affairs/flings/FWBs with Indian boytoys. Oh, the slutty ‘70s.

Manasi Subramaniam, Penguin’s newest Editor-in-Chief, hard-sold Tiffany Tsao’s The Majesties so aggressively that it really made me wonder if Manasi had forgotten that The Majesties isn’t even published by Penguin. Maybe I’m just a cynical cunt, maybe Manasi just loves Tiffany. There’s nothing I love more than lezzies who are happily married to men.

I’ve been attending JLF since 2009. 2023 is my 11^th visit. Over these 14 years, I never ever asked a question. I broke my silence & asked Beevor-Harding-Montefiore, “I will play devil’s advocate here. Could Ukraine have done anything to stop Russia from waging war, barring, metaphorically, bending over, pulling down their trousers, & letting go of all their civil liberties and freedom of speech?”

Beevor-Harding-Montefiore unanimously proclaimed, “Nope.”

Beevor-Harding-Montefiore also quoted Napolean, “Prostitution is the only profession where Amateur is often better than the Professional.”

In the panel more diverse than a Benetton commercial, Drew Schufletowski was more nervous than a 15-year-old boy caught with hands-in-pants with his girl by a nun in a Vatican church, and host Navdeep Suri forgot to ask baby-faced UAE Ambassador Abdulnasser Alshaali any questions though they were sitting closer than passengers in Haryana Roadways. Maybe Saini doesn’t like baby-faced Muslims. Ha!

In the final session, Örlã & I sat on the carpet. Ruth Harris revealed that Swami Vivekananda loved beef curry and had the hots for busty white women, and wanted to be re-born as a busty white woman. Damn, Swami!

JLF has evolved since it began as a virgin in 2006, with 97 attendees. In 2023, JLF, with millions of attendees, is the world’s greatest whorehouse of writers & selfie-junkies. When I first attended JLF in 2009, I felt like I was on an orgasmic 5-day honeymoon with sexy writers. Now it feels a lot more like a marriage on-the-rocks. Au contraire, Örlã, 22, attending JLF for the first time, loved it. 

Will I be back in 2024?

Why not? It’s still fun to come to JLF to watch teenagers & Shobha Dé wear the same tiny outfits, purple hair, cleavage tattoos, 3-year-olds addicted to cellphones, rich-bald men with potbellies-&-toupees, homeless humans on pavements right outside posh JLF, & listen to writers tell us how sextacularly awesome their latest book is even with a Goodreads rating of 2.73 & 23-year-old readers claiming the novel caused them menopause.