Bangalore Literature Festival is home-ward bound with a 'Look East' theme this year

BANGALORE: The Bangalore Literature Festival is home-ward bound with a 'Look East' theme this year after focusing on Australia and Germany in the previous two editions. Apart from bringing together the publishing ecosystem, the festi val's format brings literary , po litical, and social aspects of North East India to the forefront through discussion and debate over three days.
"We're bringing authors from each of seven states this year as well as social and political activists," said Vikram Sampath, founding team member of BLF. BLF also seeks to democratise literature with balanced representation of English and regional languages as part of its overall agenda to encourage a new generation of readers and writers.Alongside, this edition is dedicated to late UR Ananthamurthy with a to late UR Ananthamurth film on him from Sahitya Akademi, a comprehensive photo exhibition and "Shraddanjali" "Shraddanjali" (Remembrance) by Girish Karnad and SG Vasudev.

BLF, unlike its old BLF, unlike its older, il lustrious counterpart Jaipur Literature Festival, is fully community-funded and driven without corporate sponsorship with prime audience being old and new cityfolk, an aspect the team prides itself on. "BLF is more like a homegrown college festival for people in the city which Bangalore has put together," said V Ravichandar, civic evangelist and chairman, Feedback Consulting, and key advisor to BLF.

Fifty-three individuals have contributed personal mon ey to get it up and running, with some prolific names from Bangalore's high net worth circles."All Indian literary festivals have to contend with Jaipur Lit festival, which remains the country's bestattended, most diverse, most exciting festival. The way to go is to focus on local conditions and see what would suit the cultural climate of a particular city.

The fact that BLF is held in Electronics City seems like a good idea with the captive audience of IT profes sionals there," said Anjum Hasan, speaker at BLF. She's also the author of novels "Neti, Neti", "Lunatic in my Head" and collection of poems, "Street on the Hill".

Another angle is around press freedom and media with a few panels chaired by media personalities like Shekhar Gupta, Arun Shourie and Madhu Trehan, among others.

This year, the team has bumped up chances for young, aspirational authors with a unique concept LitMart, where shortlisted entries on book ideas will be pitched to publishing professionals.

"I don't see too many upcoming authors over there. Jaipur has wellestablished and over publicised ones. Bangalore has authors who've just published, but for upcoming authors I think you need a totally different festival where they can showcase their talents but I personally don't think it is a good forum for upcoming authors," said Gita Aravamudan, author of Baby Makers: The Story of Indian Surrogacy, speaker and second time participant at BLF.

"We had one and a half venues the first year, this grew to 2 and a half venues in the second year nd now it is 3 and and now it is 3 and half venues and still growing," said Shinie Antony , founding team member of BLF. After year-on-year success, show by growing numbers, the BLF team wants to scale it even further next edition, by bringing in close to 30 foreign authors.

"Our scaling point will come at year 5 or 6. It's a core community that brought BLF to this stage, and is a classic angel investing scenario," said Srikrishna Ramamoorthy , Partner at Unitus Seed Fund, and founding member of BLF.

Crime fiction and travel author Zac O' Yeah said, "Globally literature fests are a verification of literature, it is a part showing that it's not going to die. With bookshops disappearing, literary festivals are taking over." Yeah's a speaker at BLF too. Last minute drop-outs for this year are Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth and Arundhuti Roy .