Travels with my auntie maggie’s remedy

Sitting room

In Jaipur for the annual literary shindig: and it’s pretty clear that this country takes the American approach to writers - treating them as celebrity intellectuals (celebrectuals?) to be fawned over - rather than the traditional British attitude of regarding them as mildly eccentric curios in corduroy and then hectoring them for something they wrote while drunk in 1973. JM Coetzee reads a moderately interesting short story and is acclaimed like he’s St Peter preaching the epistles to the apostles.

One thing that’s changed for the better since last year is that it doesn’t feel quite so much like a society gathering for the keen-to-be-seen great and the good of Delhi and their gazillions of media hangers-on. There are actually some real people this time.

But that’s not to say there aren’t still irritations: the large crowds mean that seats for events are at a premium. So five minutes before one starts you have to play this futile game of walking down rows of empty seats being told by the one person within book-bag throwing distance, “sorry, these are taken”, or worse, “sorry, there’s somebody sitting there”. (How I can look at an empty seat, and be told that there is somebody sitting there, and not question my own sanity is beyond me.)

But I’m a courteous, well brung-up person (sometimes), so I rage inwardly and sit on the grass with the schoolkids, losing my fixed Britisher-abroad polite smile only for a second to cast a withering glance at the highfalutin Dilliwallas who emerge from the powder room and park their elegant behinds on a pristine white seat with thirty seconds to spare.


Boogie wonderland

A few days later I drop anchor in Bangalore for a dance festival, rattling my way everywhere I go with an assortment of pills that would make Shaun Ryder proud. I’m experiencing a minor bout of a condition that strikes every few months when you’re in India and is best described as ‘dodginess’. So after a day of taking all the drugs I can lay my hands on, but most importantly following my mother’s sage advice that ‘sleep is the best medicine’, I feel fully rehabilited and ready to retake my place in society.

Bangalore has the best arts audiences in India, and the more difficult to sell it looks on paper, the more they seem to lap it up. Series of solo contemporary dance pieces by unknown emerging choreographers from small damp island a long way away? That’ll be a full house and rapturous acclaim, sir. Do come again.