August start: A Capital time was had by all

The Times LitFest-Delhi promises a heady mix of the commercial and the literary, and its launch certainly provided a very entertaining confluence. After Amish's feel-good chat, festival co-director Nalin Mehta conducted a session with Upamanyu Chatterjee, possibly one of the most idiosyncratic figures in the world of Indian English writing. Also on the stage was Rahul Bose, who played Agastya Sen in the movie, and was as voluble as Chatterjee was withdrawn.
Chatterjee was asked about his book English, August, often described as inaugurating a new urban sensibility in Indian writing, and his most famous character, the stoner-civil-servant Agastya Sen.
Did Agastya Sen represent a generation? "That would make him boring," said Chatterjee, saying that he had survived all these years in public memory because "he is so weird".
There was much laddish humour - when asked about Agastya Sen's frequent masturbation, Chatterjee responded, "There's very little to do in the district," with a look that Bose described as "ruminative and nostalgic". When Mehta quoted a line from the book, "It is better to be a porn star than a bureaucrat" and asked Chatterjee if he still believed it, pat came the answer, "It's been 30 years and no one has offered me a role yet." When asked how much of him there was in Agastya Sen, Chatterjee quoted Henry James, saying that a writer of fiction did not need to write autobiography.
Once upon a time, English was seen as vital to being successful and cool - but is it less important now, asked Mehta. Chatterjee deflected the question, saying there was nothing stopping people from knowing many languages. “I buy cigarettes in Hindi, talk to my dog in Bengali".
Bose spoke of how the success of English, August, the movie, had led many to believe there was a market for English language movies. That didn't happen, as the industry realized that the same audience could be targeted with hybrid films like Jhankaar Beats and Dil Chahta Hai. Now, he says, there could be “a hundred English, Augusts".
Chatterjee played the eccentric writer to the hilt -ignoring questions he didn't want to answer, describing the English of computers and management as “gobbledygook“, telling young people to switch off their phones, read and "concentrate on phrases". After one of his prolonged silences, Bose reminded him he was holding a mic, not an ice-cream.
The audience questions focused on Chatterjee's double life as bureaucrat and writer, with one person asking whether the fetters of his working life made him "go wild" on the page. The answer was "yes".