Day3@Jaipur

One of the little thrills of this festival is to catch hold of novelists and journalists (the delegate kind) and let rip the questions. And so, when we found ourselves in a room with Alexander McCall Smith, our first instinct was to lock the door from inside (to deter PR reps from reminding us of the time), and settle in for a long conversation. But an agent outside frantically poked at her wrist, and 15 minutes was all we had.

Once we were past how he writes, how much he does, and if he has ever missed a deadline (he hasn’t), the conversation turned to questions of morality. Morality is often in play in Smith’s books, and we wanted to know where it came from.

Smith didn’t go to church very much. But he has a keen interest in spirituality. “I have a very broad theology. In the sense that I think having a spiritual dimension to one’s life is very important, but I think that one can find that in all sorts of ways. Some people find it through music, poetry or religion. What I find depressing is that some people have put the spiritual out of their life. That I find rather narrow and sad in a way.”

He’s intrigued by the evolution of agony columns from being forums where people could cry their heart out to places where people question the little things in life. “I’m very interested in ethics. I’m interested in moral philosophy. I think the question of how we lead our lives is interesting for most of us. It’s significant that some newspapers used to have agony aunts and now have agony philosophers. I think people find it fascinating to think about the ordinary implications of life. How we treat our friends, and when, if ever, it is alright to lie. These are tiny problems that are of intense interest to people, and that comes out in these books. Dalhousie (He’s currently working on the seventh of the Isabel Dalhousie mystery series) has a lot of those issues. It’s also about her relationship with a younger man, which raises [those] issues for her. And she’s interested in when you can say, when people come in contact with us, that your problems are my problems.”

There are worlds between Botswana and Edinburgh, where Smith’s protagonists operate. And while there’s a strong sense of morality in both places, his characters tackle it in different ways. Isabel Dalhousie, for instance, is a trained philosopher, while Mma Ramotswe hasn’t had much of a formal education. “Dalhousie looks at things as a trained philosopher would. Mma Ramotswe would have been educated to, say, 15 or something like that. But she often reaches the right solution based on her intuitive understanding. The code of morality is very important in Botswana. Because it was a moral system based on respect for others. And it played down selfishness. And that was one of the interesting things about African societies—that attitude to sharing, which is very, very fine.”

The morning was dominated by Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright and Max Rodenbeck’s discussion on the decline of Al Qaeda. “There are as many people here as there are left in Al Qaeda,” Coll said at one point. Wright saw the humor in the group’s predicament as it lost influence steadily on either side of September 11, 2001. He mimicked the likely panic they felt when their work was threatened by conspiracy theories in the aftermath. “They were like, ‘no, no! We did it! We’re responsible!’” Describing their declining influence and the tiny measures the group was taking to stay relevant, Coll reasoned that they could only pass on bomb-making skills for so long before somebody thought they were a liability and ousted them. It’s like having a manufacturing partner in China, Coll said. Once you tell them how you did it, you’re out.

“Al Qaeda is failing today,” Coll said. “The political claims that AQ made are just as resonant now as they were back then, but people are done with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wanted to be the vanguard of a revolution 20 years ago. Now they’re nowhere. It’s ambitions have come to a roadblock. Is that the end? I hope so. But as long as you have the spore of AQ intact, it’s a continuing danger. It will probably find new ways [of announcing itself].

Asked to describe Gaza’s importance, where he recently spent three weeks during a total lockdown by the Israelis, Wright said, “Well, it’s important to Bin Laden,” before talking about why Al Qaeda wasn’t important to the Palestinians. “He mentions Palestine in nearly all his speeches because it draws upon the anger of the Muslim world. But excluding Abu Zubeida, there are no Palestinians in Al Qaeda. Because it doesn’t offer a solution to their problems.”

Later in the discussion, Basharat Peer, who made for an excellent moderator, asked Coll if he was saying that Al Qaeda was of no value any more to other groups. Coll replied, “Their value is in their brand.” The group’s media operations churn out 150-200 finished videos each year, according to Coll. He spoke about the way AQ and especially the Taliban had evolved. “The Taliban’s media operations are many orders greater than that [of Al Qaeda’s]. There was a great scene in Lawrence’s book at Bin Laden’s son wedding, in 2000, when he finds Taliban guests and he really wants a family video tape of it, but he’s afraid that the Taliban guests will see him using a video camera, so he actually has someone shooting it hiding a camera under a robe. That’s where the Taliban were. And 10 years later, they’re the most prolific video-laptop-generated media operation in the borderlands.”

Basharat Peer (right) with Lawrence Wright

The festival has seen some discussions that seemed promising at first go awry because the moderators were ineffective or plain inattentive. One moderator continued to refer to both her panelists as novelists, even after she was made aware by one of them that the book was not a novel, but historical non-fiction. Another used the platform to advertise his publication’s achievements for a quarter of the speaking time. Basharat Peer, however, was a masterstroke. While he spoke softly and haltingly, his questions were clear, direct and relevant, and they took the discussion forward. This was in stark contrast to last evening, when a discussion hosted by Barkha Dutt stood no chance against the argument that the Kindle could not be taken to the bathroom and that it did not smell like a book.

One of the little thrills of this festival is to catch hold of novelists and journalists (the delegate kind) and let rip the questions. And so, when we found ourselves in a room with Alexander McCall Smith, our first instinct was to lock the door from inside (to deter PR reps from reminding us of the time), and settle in for a long conversation. But an agent outside frantically poked at her wrist, and 15 minutes was all we had.

Once we were past how he writes, how much he does, and if he has ever missed a deadline (he hasn’t), the conversation turned to questions of morality. Morality is often in play in Smith’s books, and we wanted to know where it came from.

Smith didn’t go to church very much. But he has a keen interest in spirituality. “I have a very broad theology. In the sense that I think having a spiritual dimension to one’s life is very important, but I think that one can find that in all sorts of ways. Some people find it through music, poetry or religion. What I find depressing is that some people have put the spiritual out of their life. That I find rather narrow and sad in a way.”

He’s intrigued by the evolution of agony columns from being forums where people could cry their heart out to places where people question the little things in life. “I’m very interested in ethics. I’m interested in moral philosophy. I think the question of how we lead our lives is interesting for most of us. It’s significant that some newspapers used to have agony aunts and now have agony philosophers. I think people find it fascinating to think about the ordinary implications of life. How we treat our friends, and when, if ever, it is alright to lie. These are tiny problems that are of intense interest to people, and that comes out in these books. Dalhousie (He’s currently working on the seventh of the Isabel Dalhousie mystery series) has a lot of those issues. It’s also about her relationship with a younger man, which raises [those] issues for her. And she’s interested in when you can say, when people come in contact with us, that your problems are my problems.”

There are worlds between Botswana and Edinburgh, where Smith’s protagonists operate. And while there’s a strong sense of morality in both places, his characters tackle it in different ways. Isabel Dalhousie, for instance, is a trained philosopher, while Mma Ramotswe hasn’t had much of a formal education. “Dalhousie looks at things as a trained philosopher would. Mma Ramotswe would have been educated to, say, 15 or something like that. But she often reaches the right solution based on her intuitive understanding. The code of morality is very important in Botswana. Because it was a moral system based on respect for others. And it played down selfishness. And that was one of the interesting things about African societies—that attitude to sharing, which is very, very fine.”

The morning was dominated by Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright and Max Rodenbeck’s discussion on the decline of Al Qaeda. “There are as many people here as there are left in Al Qaeda,” Coll said at one point. Wright saw the humor in the group’s predicament as it lost influence steadily on either side of September 11, 2001. He mimicked the likely panic they felt when their work was threatened by conspiracy theories in the aftermath. “They were like, ‘no, no! We did it! We’re responsible!’” Describing their declining influence and the tiny measures the group was taking to stay relevant, Coll reasoned that they could only pass on bomb-making skills for so long before somebody thought they were a liability and ousted them. It’s like having a manufacturing partner in China, Coll said. Once you tell them how you did it, you’re out.

“Al Qaeda is failing today,” Coll said. “The political claims that AQ made are just as resonant now as they were back then, but people are done with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wanted to be the vanguard of a revolution 20 years ago. Now they’re nowhere. It’s ambitions have come to a roadblock. Is that the end? I hope so. But as long as you have the spore of AQ intact, it’s a continuing danger. It will probably find new ways [of announcing itself].

Asked to describe Gaza’s importance, where he recently spent three weeks during a total lockdown by the Israelis, Wright said, “Well, it’s important to Bin Laden,” before talking about why Al Qaeda wasn’t important to the Palestinians. “He mentions Palestine in nearly all his speeches because it draws upon the anger of the Muslim world. But excluding Abu Zubeida, there are no Palestinians in Al Qaeda. Because it doesn’t offer a solution to their problems.”

Later in the discussion, Basharat Peer, who made for an excellent moderator, asked Coll if he was saying that Al Qaeda was of no value any more to other groups. Coll replied, “Their value is in their brand.” The group’s media operations churn out 150-200 finished videos each year, according to Coll. He spoke about the way AQ and especially the Taliban had evolved. “The Taliban’s media operations are many orders greater than that [of Al Qaeda’s]. There was a great scene in Lawrence’s book at Bin Laden’s son wedding, in 2000, when he finds Taliban guests and he really wants a family video tape of it, but he’s afraid that the Taliban guests will see him using a video camera, so he actually has someone shooting it hiding a camera under a robe. That’s where the Taliban were. And 10 years later, they’re the most prolific video-laptop-generated media operation in the borderlands.”

Basharat Peer (right) with Lawrence Wright

The festival has seen some discussions that seemed promising at first go awry because the moderators were ineffective or plain inattentive. One moderator continued to refer to both her panelists as novelists, even after she was made aware by one of them that the book was not a novel, but historical non-fiction. Another used the platform to advertise his publication’s achievements for a quarter of the speaking time. Basharat Peer, however, was a masterstroke. While he spoke softly and haltingly, his questions were clear, direct and relevant, and they took the discussion forward. This was in stark contrast to last evening, when a discussion hosted by Barkha Dutt stood no chance against the argument that the Kindle could not be taken to the bathroom and that it did not smell like a book.

About The Author

Rahul Bhatia