Glimpses from day 1 at Jaipur Lit Fest

It has been a helluva Day One at the Jaipur Literature Festival. In perhaps what has been one of the most stellar line-up of the festival, rediff.com saw some of the greatest names in literature and journalism walk the grounds of Diggi Palace, the venue of the festival. Abhishek Mande reports.

Salman Rushdie who was to attend finally turned down the invite and chose to stay away from the event, much to everyone's dismay. (Don't miss his entire statement being read out here.

There have been rumours though that the author may put up an appearance via video conference. However as author William Dalrymple pointed out earlier in the day, there were 262 other authors at the festival.

We take you through the day in a series of nuggets, quotes and tweets of people who were attending the festival.

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The first big session of the day was one featuring Michael Ondaatje who was in conversation with Amitava Kumar. Ondatje, who has only recently released his latest book The Cat's Table, isn't much of a speaker. However when Kumar, a professor (when he isn't an author), did let him speak, the Canada-based Booker winner did have some interesting things to say.

He spoke of how collage as an art form has influenced him, the element of history drives him to write and the fact that he's almost always skips the first 30 pages of autobiographies because there's hardly anything of interest in people's childhood.

Charlie Chaplin's childhood, he said with his tongue firmly in cheek, was 'stolen Dickens'!

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