A writer's quartete-a-tete

“What are the consolations of age?” asked poet Jeet Thayil, to the young audience who sat watching him intently. A moment of silence later, he said, “There are none. Don’t grow old.” And the people at the Under 25 Lit Fest were young enough to find this uproariously funny.

The Under 25 Lit Fest, which happened at The Hummingtree on Sunday, was packed beyond measure, interspersed generously with indie gigs — which everybody loved. “If we had had more people, we would have needed a third stage out on the pavement,” an organiser said in confidence during the day. Book swapping, the Human Library, acoustic musics and comic interventions by Danish Sait, were, it seemed, the recipe for success.

Twenty-two-year-old Zui Kumar-Reddy, a writer based in Bengaluru, was among the youngest authors present. Her work is raw, uncensored and full of angst, and to her surprise, she found many engaging with her and her work.

“A lot of older people were skeptical about a Lit Fest for under 25s,” she said. “But I found so many people my age who had read my work and identified with it. When I was in school, I didn’t get the support I needed. It was only when I went to study in the US, that I found myself. Our education system needs to remove its barriers and let students talk about these things,” she explained.

Manu Pillai, the bright young historian whose book, Ivory Thrones, has been making waves in literary circles, participated in a panel with author Vikram Sampath and journalist Vasanthi Hariprakash. Pillai was met with a barrage of questions, with people asking him why the interesting bits of history are left out of our textbooks.

“We have a very nationalised version of history, which I understand,” he said. “We tend to only talk of things that fit into this nationalist agenda. It’s time we looked for other narratives and people who have shaped our history.”

Curator Surya Harikrishnan, who worked non-stop to organise the Lit Fest and went to college on Monday morning, is elated by the response. “It got a little crowded, but that was wonderful,” he said.

The Under 25 Lit Fest was promoted as the ‘cool place to be on a Sunday’, which worked. “Many youngsters admited that they don’t read very much and were drawn to the Under 25 Brand, but meeting the authors made them want to start.”

Love, erotica, modern relationships, the media —these were the topics that seemed to draw the largest audience, simply because young people don’t have the chance to discuss these things in their daily lives. “The interactive sessions like the Human Library, where people swapped stories about their lives and the workshops, resonated most with the crowd,” Surya added.

“At the end of the day, the youth wants something interactive, they seem to need an emotional connect more than mere knowledge.”