India is a land of festivals, and during the last three or four years we have added one more festival to our calendar of delights - the literary festival.

Kolkata has always had its book fairs and literary occasions, but the Lit Fest as we now know it - the coming together of writers and book-lovers - received an impetus a few years ago in Jaipur and has since spread to almost every town and city in a land hungering for intellectual nourishment: Bangalore, Pune, Goa, Bhubaneswar, Agra, Allahabad, Travancore, Kasauli, Mussoorie, Patna, not to mention our major cities. And now even schools and other institutions are conducting their own festivals; perhaps we had a surfeit of technological nourishment and are looking for something a little more creative and personal.

All this literary activity has come about because in recent years large numbers of Indian writers have been making it big on the national and international scene. And in this era of television and the Internet, successful writers soon become celebrities.

That means writing has at last become fashionable. Fame is the spur!

When I was a boy with literary ambitions I did dream of becoming a famous writer one day. What are dreams for, after all? Even if we fail, we can still dream. They keep us hoping and striving - and dreaming!

In those far-off days there were no literary festivals. Book launches were rare. Authors were read, seldom heard or seen. P.G. Wodehouse tells us of how, at a literary get-together, his hostess came up to him and said, 'So good of you to come. I've always wanted to meet Edgar Wallace!'

My literary icons were Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene, H.E. Bates, and of course P.G. Wodehouse. I read almost everything they wrote. But they were 'invisible' authors. Their names may have been household words, but you seldom saw them in person. Sometimes a smudgy black- and-white photograph appeared on the back cover of a book, but that was all. A successful playwright such as J.M. Barrie might take a bow at the end of the opening night of Peter Pan, and that was it. He would then return to his eyrie to write another play or novel. And it was the same with Maugham who, because of his stammer, hated making public appearances.

In 1953, when I was living and working in London - just 19 years old - a young producer invited me to give a talk on the BBC's Home Service (those were radio days) on what it was like to grow up in India before and after Independence. While I was waiting for my turn in the studio, a tall good-looking man of about forty entered the small waiting-room and sat down beside me. We exchanged pleasantries, mostly about the weather and the coming Coronation (nothing very intellectual I'm afraid) and then he got up and left the room. My producer came in just then and said, 'I see you have met Graham Greene. He was here for a book programme.'

So the stranger had been Graham Greene, then probably at the height of his fame as a novelist. He had recently written the script for the film The Third Man, which had been having a successful run in the West End cinemas. I had read several of his books - Brighton Rock, Stamboul Train, The Confidential Agent - but I hadn't recognised him!

How wonderful to be anonymous!

Had Graham Greene been one of the stars in his film, he would have been recognised immediately. But one of the charms of being an author was that you could be 'invisible' - just another wayfarer roaming the streets in search of a story.

In search of a story...

For that, in a way, is what writing is all about. Looking for a story - and telling it.

When I was starting out as a writer, an author was someone who'd had a book published. Until that happened, you were just a writer! I remember when my first novel was finally accepted (after submitting three rewrites) my editor and publisher, Diana Athill, took me out to dinner and said, 'Well, Ruskin, you are finally an author!'

Dianna Athill was then a young partner in the firm of Andre Deutsch. She was the first to publish V.S. Naipaul, Jack Kerouac, and other rising stars in the literary firmament. Her book about authors and publishers, called Stet, should be read by everyone who cares about the written word.

It was 1955, I was twenty-one, and my first book was about to be published. After four years in London and the Channel Islands, I was on my way home to India. In many ways I was still a boy, with a boy's dreams. Thanks to all the great books I had read, I could write fluently and in a style of my own. But would writing sustain me?

Well, it did - but only just...

Those early years of freelancing in the India of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, weren't easy, partly because good publishers were thin on the ground. But I was determined to make a living from my writing, and I was determined to do it here. The stories, the essays, the poems kept coming, and so, finally, did the publishers.

And so here I am before you, sixty years after my first book, The Room on the Roof, was published - still scribbling away, trying to be a better writer. Hundreds of stories have been told, but there are still stories to tell; for stories of love and childhood and kindness have no endings.

(December 15, 2014)