The city feasted on books for much of Monday.
The lawns of Alipore Jail Museum, the venue for the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet, partnered by The Telegraph, were brimming with people. The 400-odd seats arranged by the organisers were occupied from the first session itself.
By 1pm, when Kiran Desai took to the stage to talk about her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the size of the audience had grown significantly.
So what if the seats were full? People sat on the ground, on the raised
platform for the broadcast team, on the benches at the base of trees, on the steps
of ladders and wherever else they could. Many kept standing under the canopy.
“I read The Inheritance of Loss (the acclaimed second novel by Desai, which won the 2006 Man Booker Prize) just as I stepped into college. I fell in love with Desai. Two decades have passed. Both of us have evolved, but my admiration for her is undiminished,” said Stuti Sarkar, 38, who works in the HR department of a private hospital. She walked into the festival around 12.15pm and stayed put till 6.30pm.
Around 15km away, Central Park in Salt Lake, venue for the 49th International Kolkata Book Fair, was also packed throughout the day. The crowd count was around four lakh, said Tridib Chatterjee, honourary general secretary, Publishers and Booksellers Guild.
Swarnali Guha Roy, a schoolteacher, came with her 10-year-old daughter.
“Our attention span is decreasing every day because of the over-dependence on technology. Children are perhaps the worst affected. Books are the perfect antidote to this obsession with the screen,” she said.
Roy, who came from Lake Town, purchased Tomb of Sand, the 2018 Hindi-language novel by Indian author Geetanjali Shree, which was translated into English by Daisy Rockwell. In 2022, the book became the first novel translated from an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize.
Her daughter, a student in Class IV, purchased a couple of books from the classic six-novel series Malory Towers by Enid Blyton.