Report

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone” - Rainer Maria Rilke

He walked up the stairs: his bearing deliberate, his progress incremental. He held in his right hand a satchel with a tiffin box inside - his lunch - proof that he was here to stay. He was slightly bent with age, his polyester pants sagging with the weight of his wallet, from which stuck out a bus pass. That this old man walking past me wanted a literary afternoon, that of all the afternoons that he could have had he had chosen this one - it spoke to something in me, to some hazy, romantic idea I had of literature and what it was meant to do. Even with my inherent skepticism, I had a vision of something being redeemed, although I would not know until later just what it was.

It is possible, even desirable, to fruitfully generalize, to paint the the Hindu Lit for Life in broad strokes: it had irreverence, passion, humor, nuance, pathos.

In the new India where material markers increasingly dictate the value of things, Lit for Life offered both hope and refuge: fiercely protective of the traditional mo...