By all accounts, the festival isn’t what it used to be. It seems the event had a whimsy and charm about it, especially as veterans describe the past four years. Now, amid the banners and stalls, with schoolchildren, authors, security, and overdressed Rajasthanis, there’s firm evidence that the enterprise isn’t the homely thing it used to be. Crowds jam into the main Durbar Hall, and if you try finding a seat ten minutes after the start of a session, don’t bother. At this festival, you don’t sit.

There’s something wrong here. Between the Mughal tent and the Baithak, there’s a crowd swarming around Girish Karnad’s table. He signs their copies and sends them off with silly smiles. Meanwhile, Tishani Doshi languishes at a table behind him.

The Mughal tent is now called the Merrill Lynch Mughal tent. This morning, quite aptly, the Merrill Lynch tent hosts Lawrence Wright, Tunku Vardarajan, Max Rodenbeck and Kai Bird, who discuss why West Asia is susceptible to conspiracy theories. Pithy observations are made, as in when Wright replies to one question with, “Well, Islam is under attack from the West because it attacked the West. So it was self-fulfilling.” He talks about how Bin Laden’s (by the way, Wright interviewed 600 people for his 9/11 book The Looming Tower. Get your head around that number) inability to bring down the house of Saud, and attacking America instead ended up creating the sort of siege of Islam he had always accused them of. “He pulled us into it,” Wright says. Rodenbeck, who writes for The Economist, says that the conspiracies people subscribe to are dependent on their political allegiance. That makes sense.

Wright touches upon his time as an editor in a Saudi Arabia newspaper. (His first visa application was rejected. He succeeded in entering the country as a newspaper editor. Ah, here’s the story: http://www.lawrencewright.com/art-saudi.html ) “Opinions are alright,” he says. “In the Middle East you can voice an opinion. But you can’t report the facts.”

But all of this is lost on a crowd that sees an ‘alternative truth’ in conspiracies. One bearded young man succeeds in attacking the panel, accusing the participants of all kinds of things.

“Firstly, it felt like you people were spokespersons for the mainstream media. Like it was a Fox News or CNN programme. Secondly, the accusations you made against the alternative media are made without any facts, figures or evidence. It was pure rhetoric. We have all read Chomsky—he’s a popular figure, he’s a cult figure. We know that our mainstream media is company-controlled. We know that companies and nation states have their own vested interests. So when the alternative media comes out with some truth/ fact, why do people like you dismiss it as amateur/conspiracy theory? You people were using bitter rhetoric and promoting stereotypes,” he concludes to an ovation, with aunties in the front row turning around to take in the brave questioner, no doubt imagining what a fine young son-in-law he will make.

“Well, I’d like to answer that,” Wright rises to it, clearly in disagreement with the aunties. “…conspiracy thinkers follow me around for my speeches. They want to make points similar to yours—that there’s an alternative truth. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to talk to these people, because I spent five years of my life investigating the facts, and talking to 600 people about what really happened. It was not just a casual thing on my part. It was a mission to find out what really happened. Those conspiracy thinkers were not on a mission. They wanted to propound their point of view. Often, like in the case of 9/11, they take an idea such as ‘if an airplane struck a tower, it would not fall in that way’. This is behind most 9/11 conspiracy thinking. Now, the experiment of having a fully loaded airplane run into a tower at 500 miles an hour hasn’t been run many times. Twice, that I know of. And in both cases, the towers fell! Evidently that is what happens when you run an airplane into a tower. But from the conspiracy thinkers’ point of view, it couldn’t have happened that way, and if you studied it, it would look like there had been an explosion. It all fell down in one big heap. If that’s true, there must have been explosives placed in the tower. Therefore somebody knew that the airplanes were going to hit, but that they were going to fail. And in order to make it succeed, they had to put the explosives. Who could do that? Well, only the CIA. So they must have known that Osama bin Laden or somebody was going to fly airplanes that day into the Twin Towers, but they weren’t going to succeed, because we wanted to attack the Islamic world. So it goes on and on and on, and ultimately gets to anti-Semitism, because the guy who owned the Twin Towers was a Jew.

But I defend the process of hard-working journalists—who are supported by magazines and book publishers at great expense—going out into the world to find out what actually happened rather than imagining what happened from their chairs in their offices.”
The reply got applause, but not as much as the questioner did.