Festival notes 6

Some final scrapings from the Jaipur-fest barrel:

People loved Aamir's Ghajini because it laid everything on so thick – it's like eating vada pao and tikki. Incidentally, everyone talks about it being a Memento copy but hardly anyone pointed out that the scene with the blind man is a straight lift from Amelie

(Chetan Bhagat, discussing popular taste and in the process revealing that he watches French films)

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You can be a magpie when you write in English. If I were writing in Bangla I don't know if I would have been allowed to use non-Bangla words

(Tahmima Anam)

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I like my friends! They call me a gregarious hermit.

(Vikram Seth, in reply to Sonia Faleiro asking if he was a solitary writer who wasn't too keen on making friends)

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Before coming here, I was told that pleasure was one of the characteristics of Hinduism. Well, we certainly had a lot of that here!

(Scottish poet Meg Bateman, discussing the weeklong "Found in Translation" workshop for poets in Neemrana)

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More Nadeem Aslam:

I'm told that it's a good time to be a Pakistani writer – people are interested in your work. Well, I feel the opposite: I'd much rather that my country wasn't burning and my books didn't sell.

I find it very difficult to define people in terms of a religious or nationalist identity. I have 51 first cousins – yes, I know, that's the BJP's nightmare! – which means that right since childhood I've known 51 different ways of being a human being. One cousin is a non-believer, another is devout, one is happily married, another is divorced, another is unhappily married but sticking to the marriage...I can go on and on and on, there's a whole spectrum right there.

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And on a completely unrelated note, two blog posts I recently read and enjoyed: Scott Adams' very moving post about his beloved cat Sarah; and Roger Ebert on...many different things, including parthogenesis, the Donald Duck family tree, and the mathematics of the hereafter.