My experience at Jaipur Literature Festival 2013

The first time I heard about the Jaipur Lit Fest was during my years on the IIM Ahmedabad campus, when a few friends decided to attend. Due to personal commitments at those times, I could not attend but when the 2013 version came and I was at Gurgaon, I decided to attend it on Republic Day. So when the nation was celebrating(or rather indifferent to!) Republic day, me and many other literature lovers were enjoying the various sessions on offer. So without much ado, I recount my experience and some tips for getting the most out of the fest

1. The venue(Hotel Diggi Palace) is very close to SMS Hospital(which all autos/buses know). So rather than spend on a cab and pollute the environment/lighten your wallet, consider taking a city bus or a share auto. That should just cost you Rs 10 each way. 
2. There is no restriction on taking food/drinks inside the venue. Considering that items are slightly on the upper side, consider taking basic snacks/munchies with you, or have a good breakfast(the awesome poha/parathas/dal bhati) outside and then attend
3. Registration is free(basic version) or paid(this year Rs 2500 where you get hamper from sponsor, free food and attending the music concert). Even valuing the free food at Rs 600, concert at Rs 400, that means you pay Rs 1500 for the hamper and the pleasure of being a patron of the litfest. Considering you get no other privileges like preferred seating, thats your choice. The name tag for paid registrations has your name, which might help for those of you focussed on networking.Make sure to pre register else if crowds too much, they may close the spot registration.
4. The souvenir booklet(this year Rs 100) containing bios and detailed description of talk outline, is totally worth it. Otherwise, you spend lots of time Googling the authors to guess what they may be speaking about and stuff like that
5. Its better to go as a group not only due to the carnival atmosphere, but also to ensure you get seating even when return from lunch/snack breaks. Here, like in any other Indian ethos, the concept of blocking seats exists. While I protested and got my way, you may not be thickskinned enough to do it when alone. So keep that in mind
6. This year, the bookshop sold books by all attending authors. So if you want to make the author happy(but don't want to/have time to, order online), purchase a book at the litfest and Queue up for the post talk signing. 
7. The sessions are usually 2+ authors(generally 3-4), literary critics, journalists or other renowned literature personalities, with a moderator. The format is a panel discussion like what you see on TV, except that its better moderated, and has (usually) better quality audience questions. So if you are expected deep insights, forget it, but if you are ok with many short insights from various people, you are at the right place. 

Overall, it was not arty/elitist, and a pleasure to attend. But if you don;t like the program topic, better find an alternate else it may get very boring

What should an university be like-lessons from John Henry Newman

The classics often have great lessons for today's situations, because they oft contain eternal truths uninfluenced by the mass media/indoctrination of today. After reading the book The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24526/24526-h/24526-h.html),  I felt some of the ideas deserved a wider audience especially given the debate about how higher education should be/education bubble etc. I tried to do justice to the main ideas but given it was written in old English and digressed a lot on the Church-University relationship, it may not be 100% faithful to the old text. 

1. Teaching Focused:- University is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement. If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students..
2.  Separate research and teaching:-To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been too intent on their subject to admit of interruption; they have been men of absent minds and idosyncratic habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture room and the public school. Examples given are Pythagoras, Thales, Plato ,Aristotle ,Friar Bacon,Newton etc. There were  great examples the other way, perhaps Socrates, certainly Lord Bacon; still I think it must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement. 
3. The tendency for professional overeach/rent seeking Every professional man has rightly a zeal for his profession, and he would not do his duty towards it without that zeal. And that zeal soon becomes exclusive, or rather necessarily involves a sort of exclusiveness. A zealous professional man soon comes to think that his profession is all in all, and that the world would not go on without it. This collision, this desire on the part of every profession to be supreme,—this necessary, though reluctant, subordination of the one to the other,—is a process ever going on, ever acted out before our eyes. The civilian is in rivalry with the soldier, the soldier with the civilian. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the political economist, the merchant, each wishes to usurp the powers of the state, and to mould society upon the principles of his own pursuit.I remark, moreover, that these various usurpations are frequently made in perfectly good faith. There is no intention of encroachment on the part of the encroachers. 
4. The danger of  too much liberal arts education:-Nothing is more common in an age like this, when books abound, than to fancy that the gratification of a love of reading is real study. Some have a taste for reading, but in whom it is little more than the result of mental restlessness and curiosity. Such minds cannot fix their gaze on one object for two seconds together; the very impulse which leads them to read at all, leads them to read on, and never to stay or hang over any one idea. The pleasurable excitement of reading what is new is their motive principle; and the imagination that they are doing something, and the boyish vanity which accompanies it, are their reward. Such youths often profess to like poetry, or to like history or biography; they are fond of lectures on certain of the physical sciences; or they may possibly have a real and true taste for natural history or other cognate subjects;—and so far they may be regarded with satisfaction; but on the other hand they profess that they do not like logic, they do not like algebra, they have no taste for mathematics; which only means that they do not like application, they do not like attention, they shrink from the effort and lab-our of thinking, and the process of true intellectual gymnastics. The consequence will be that, when they grow up, they may, if it so happen, be agreeable in conversation, they may be well informed in this or that department of knowledge, they may be what is called literary; but they will have no consistency, steadiness, or perseverance; they will not be able to make a telling speech, or to write a good letter, or to fling in debate a smart antagonist, unless so far as, now and then, mother-wit supplies a sudden capacity, which cannot be ordinarily counted on. They cannot state an argument or a question, or take a clear survey of a whole transaction, or give sensible and appropriate advice under difficulties, or do any of those things which inspire confidence and gain influence, which raise a man in life, and make him useful to his religion or his country. 
5. Need to study theology:-When was the world without it? Have the systems of Atheism or Pantheism, as sciences, prevailed in the literature of nations, or received a formation or attained a completeness such as Monotheism? We find it in old Greece, and even in Rome, as well as in Judea and the East. We find it in popular literature, in philosophy, in poetry, as a positive and settled teaching, differing not at all in the appearance it presents, whether in Protestant England, or in schismatical Russia, or in the Mahometan populations, or in the Catholic Church. If ever there was a subject of thought, which had earned by prescription to be received among the studies of a University, and which could not be rejected except on the score of convicted imposture, as astrology or alchemy; if there be a science anywhere, which at least could claim not to be ignored, but to be entertained, and either distinctly accepted or  distinctly reprobated, or rather, which cannot be passed over in a scheme of universal instruction, without involving a positive denial of its truth, it is this ancient, this far-spreading philosophy.
6. The need for active reading/learning We must carefully distinguish,  between the mere diversion of the mind and its real education. Supposing, for instance, I am tempted to go into some society which will do me harm, and supposing, instead, I fall asleep in my chair, and so let the time pass by. The opportune sleep has but removed the temptation for this once. It has not made me better; for I have not been shielded from temptation by any act of my own, but I was passive under an accident, for such I may call sleep. And so in like manner, if I hear a lecture indolently and passively, I cannot indeed be elsewhere while I am here hearing it,—but it produces no positive effect on my mind,—it does not tend to create any power in my breast capable of resisting temptation by its own vigour, should temptation come a second time. A man may hear a thousand lectures, and read a thousand volumes, and be at the end of the process very much where he was, as regards knowledge. Something more than merely admitting it in a negative way into the mind is necessary, if it is to remain there. It must not be passively received, but actually and actively entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way to meet what comes to it from without. You have come, not merely to be taught, but to learn. You have come to exert your minds. You have come to make what you hear your own, by putting out your hand, as it were, to grasp it and appropriate it.