Book Box: JLF Diaries

We are sitting on the eighth floor, in a rooftop bar, overlooking the city of Jaipur. When she was ten years old, she began helping her elder brothers win kite flying competitions by making the best manjha coating kite flying thread with cooked rice, glue and glass powder. You can totally picture him in his childhood experiences of burrowing amongst decay and from there going on to Panama to study fungi.’ ‘Mine was the session with Javed Akhtar, Oh my God, what stories, and how he tells them – didn’t you love the one about the house and Hathi Mere Sathi?’ ‘Mine was the biography of John Donne with Katherine Rundell, what an amazing storyteller she is.’ And so on. Everywhere, there are groups like ours, with Friends, family, book clubs and school groups, get together with authors, to discuss stories from all over the world, from science, history, economics, literature, travel etc. What a wonderful volume of Indian poetry where Haldar Nag, a tribal poet from Orissa and India’s best-known poet, Gulzar, stand together as fellow poets.