Sunanda Pushkar and Shashi Tharoor at an event in Mumbai on November 8

Thiruvananthapuram, Nov. 17: “Location, location, location,” said the sage when asked the mantra of success. Going by that definition, you can’t go wrong with the India chapter of Britain’s Hay Festival. The literary jamboree, which opened today, has found the perfect spot for its three-day gathering of book lovers — right in the lap of a region famously (and perhaps a bit tiredly) said to have been appropriated by the gods.

Kerala has the sea, lush green trees, a high literacy rate and Shashi Tharoor. The member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram is believed to be among those who helped bring Britain’s popular festival — being held in Wales for the last 24 years and now in many other parts of the world — to India last year.

Before Kerala, though, there was Jaipur — another suitable tourist spot earmarked for another literary get-together — and billed as the largest in the world. If Kerala revels in its verdant shades, Jaipur has all the sparkle of a desert in winter – with a bright sun and the brilliant colours of Rajasthan, to say nothing of the famed hospitality of its people. It explains why the organisers zeroed in on Jaipur instead of, say, Rohtak in Haryana.

India, which now hosts some 10 literary festivals in a year — including one in Kovalam and another in Mumbai — is opening up all its happening spots for the literati. Next month, for instance, Goa will hold the second edition of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival. With a Rs 6,000-crore English book reading market in India — and growing by 10 per cent every year — literature, clearly, is big business.

Not surprisingly, with so many events around, the festivals are now finding their own niches. The Goa festival seeks to mark 50 years of freedom from the Portuguese. The Kovalam Literary Festival, held in October, had what’s been described as a “Pakistani flavour” — Fatima Bhutto was one of its main attractions. The DSC Jaipur festival ends with a prize for literature in south Asia.

At the Hay in Kerala — called The Alchemist Hay Festival to mark its main sponsor, Trinamul member of Parliament K.D. Singh’s Rs10,000-crore company — the focus is on the state. The festival, to be attended by 75 writers, including feminist Germaine Greer and Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, opened with a discussion on trends in Malayalam literature by two of the states’s famed litterateurs — M.T. Vasudevan Nair and M. Mukundan. The inauguration at the Kanakakkunnu Palace had a regional flavour too — with a host of drums, cymbals and nadaswarams welcoming the guests, including state minister K.C. Joseph and Tharoor and his wife Sunanda.

“That the Hay Festival came to India is good enough, but that it came to Kerala and to Thiruvananthapuram is a matter of great pride,” said Tharoor. In a subsequent discussion on China and India, he went on to describe India as “more super-poor than a superpower”. Clearly, India is an also-ran; Kerala is the flavour of the season.