All roads last week led to the Jaipur LitFest. If you hit the Sona highway and made two pit stops at the fast food restaurants enroute, there were chances that all the travellers were also heading to the festival. There was a holiday feel all around — everybody going in the same direction. There were discussions about the talks that should be attended first and about the unknown speakers who looked promising and interesting.

Delhi was cold on this particular saturday morning on January 21 when we set out, but as we entered Rajasthan, weather played a perfect host — it stayed like that all through our two-day visit.

Life is how you perceive it to be, as you like it to be. There was a maddening crowd as we entered the tent in the festival, but the mood was light and fun. The tents that housed good speakers were overcrowded and a lot of us had to stay outside and listen with our eyes shut. (But then the purpose was to listen and so that is what we did!). There were only four sets of toilets for thousands of people, but then you waited in a line and then again ran back to catch food or a coffee or the end of a talk (much like what happens in college). If you saw a friend and got up to say hello, you lost your chair (playing musical chairs). The place was teeming with people from Delhi. You had to hang onto your belongings, hang onto your friends, hang onto your chairs and hang onto your sense of humour. Like the morning Oprah spoke, there was a serpentine line outside the entry gate, 45 minutes before the talk and suddenly the gates shut. “What do you mean the gates are shut?” someone shouted. The guard threw up his hands in despair, he could not understand all the rush. It’s not as if a Mumbai film actor or the Big B was visiting. He said under his breath, “Damned, if I know. There are only books and authors here!” Little did he know what a draw that could be.

The same time Oprah spoke, Fatima Bhutto was in conversation with Ayesha Jalal and Karan Thapar and place was overflowing with people. It was a pleasure to hear her speak, succinct and to the point. There were some interesting perspectives on how dictatorship has muzzled places like Pakistan and Burma, but then change is afoot and how exciting it is to live in times that are poised on the brink of change. I was fortunate to hear some sterling American journalists who persuaded me to believe that the fine line between journalism and fiction writing has been bridged. I heard correspondents from the New Yorker and Washington Post speak and was delighted to sit in on Katherine Boo’s experience of writing her non-fiction book, to be out very soon.

I was in my element when I heard Tom Stoppard and David Hare come alive with their anecdeotes and their experiences as playwrights. Theatre holds a special place in my heart and to hear Tom say all it “takes is one good idea to take hold of him” and a script is born. He made me sit up all night reading his works. I heard Vinod Mehta in a honest and mischievous conversation with Tarun Tejpal. There were so many authors, so many discourses, so many points of view, such a delectable fare to partake of that I forgot the whole controversy on Salman Rushdie. We were all high on books and discussed well into the twilight hours with the accompanying clinking of glasses. And I chose not to let politics or religion ruin a perfectly lovely weekend.

(The writer is a theatre director and novelist)