Nine Things You Do Only At A Lit Fest

Introduce yourself as a ‘Writer’

Because let’s face it, being one is a sure shot knicker-dropper. So what if you look like the back of a horse and the only thing you have written are four Letters to the Editor and 4,500 tweets that have received the sum total of 7 favourites and 5 RTs.

Be ashamed of your day job

First, you should not have a business card at a lit fest. You should be networking purely on basis of your intellectual capacity and your ability to hurl educated barbs at others, and not because of the gold embossed 220gsm rectangular card that lists your name and designation in Edwardian. A lit fest might have named each tent after a sponsor and the loo after another, but it’s still not corporate. It’s also all about being independent, a cradle of free-thinking and all that crap.

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Regret doing your shopping at Fab India

Nehru Jackets are just too mass and commercial especially since the nightclub crowds took to them like a fish to water. Plus, there would already be a crowd of ladies bumping into each other dressed like catalogues of mass-produced ethnic Indian peddling chains. The scene will be a bit like the climax of the Thomas Crown Affair only minus the Sinner Man rendition and the bowler hat and trench replaced with an Anarkali suit from Anokhi. Which is why you stick to casuals sweaters, solid colours, no-fuss boots and mufflers.

Poorgoise is good

Everything from your denims to the crumples on your shirt and the mud on your shoes need to be more carefully scripted than Rahul Gandhi’s anger at the AICC. Even if your denims cost as much as an iPad and your iPad costs as much as a motorcycle, a Lit Fest is all about down-playing money. You are expected to slurp your chai with purpose and talk animatedly about mark-ups. Just be careful to hide the LV belt though. Nothing will kill your intellectual standing as much as a hint of a brand.

Judge everyone

Especially those who turn up over the weekend… Clearly, they are not interested in literature, have less intellectual standing than a cupcake and turn up only to eat the chaat – else they’d make the effort to turn up on a weekday! So what if the poor bloke finished work in Delhi at 10 pm and woke up at 5am to drive 5 hours to see Reza Aslan diss Christianity.

Hate Page 3

Even though the whole event is a circus carefully tailored to plug content up every orifice of the media, including the parties the media is invited to cover, but the right thing to do is to be blatantly dismissive towards them – they are two shades below scum. Get that?

Be the resident recluse

Be everywhere, the busiest tent, the chai stall, and the media terrace with a general air of being uninterested and a fog of mystery around you. Also remember, there is a difference between being a recluse and being the guy no one knows – the whole ‘scroll from top to bottom of your Whatsapp contact’ list doesn’t work anymore.

Have an animated conversation about someone else’s religion

Or even better, write a book about it. The girls at most lit fests find a lean man with salt and pepper hair and then spend the rest of the 5 days lusting after him, not too discreetly. These men more often than not are also the ones who’ve written a not too flattering book about a religion other than their own. So, by holding animated conversations about a religion that is not yours, you would be tying into the unofficial theme of the fest, which will automatically make you the podgy-bellied replacement to the hottie author being compared to George Clooney by lit fest groupies.

Be ready to burn a Kindle/Kobo

Nothing beats the smell of printed pages. You get that, nothing! Not even the obscenely expensive perfume your ex-gf got you. People with the gall to carry one to the lit fest need to be culled in their sleep and their digital book-reading platforms need to be recycled into desk fans. So what if the last 2 books you “read” were audio books, because you realised eveb e e-readers were too much trouble?

From the February 2014 issue of FHM India.