THE HAUL AT THE HLF 2026

 

Like every year this year too I attended the Hyderabad Literary Festival 2026 on all three days as I have retired from my job and have a lot of free time on hand. Last year I could attend only on two days as I was still working. This year too the HLF venue was the Sattva Knowledge City, quite far from where I live. Since it was in the zone where IT companies are so numerous that almost every building houses IT firms. So everything about HLF, almost everything, involved IT. For example the free shuttle from the Raidurg Metro station to Sattva was run by some firm that wanted you to download its app and fill numerous details like your name, mobile number, email ID, name of company you work, location of your home and such questions all for a five minute ride! I got down from the shuttle and took a Rapido bike on all the three days. 

Next IT thing was at the food court where you had to scan a QR code to order anything even the humble chai, pay online and then receive another QR code that you had to show to the joint who will scan it and then give your order. Boy, are they making things difficult for everyone at the HLF. One elderly who wanted to order lunch cried out in despair that she did not know how to do it. 

Even the registration process involved another long online process. This was the painful part, using IT for everything. Thank god one could go to the loo without anything involving IT. But who knows next year they might ask you to scan before you enter the loo. 

Anyway, what I noticed was that the crowd did not appear to be what it was last year when there were simply swarms of people at every session. Also, many of the top authors were missing. On the first day I was at the session ‘Freedom, Control and the News’ with Dhanya Rajendran (TNM) and Pamela Philipose on the panel moderated by Vinod Pavarala. It was interesting to know how digital news media functions. After lunch I listened to Samanth Subramanian talk about ‘Equator Magazine’ that he is associated with. Then I sat in the session ‘Prioritizing Palestine’ with Stanly Johny and Sarah Zia on the panel moderated by mana Sunita Reddy. Stanly Johny’s columns in The Hindu are wonderfully written with a lot of analysis about the situation in the Middle East. Since I had to take the family out somewhere in the evening I had to leave early. 

On Sunday, the second day of HLF I sat through a few sessions and what I enjoyed was Kaveri Nambisan’s talk with Aparna Rayprol. I had taken along the copy of ‘The Truth (Almost) About Bharat’ her debut novel to get it signed by her but I couldn’t. Also interesting was the session on ‘Resistant Readings’ with Kavita Kane and Volga. 

The session ‘Many Ramayanas, Many Lessons’ by Anand Neelakantan turned out to be a very interesting one with Anand Neelakantan making the audience break out in splits with his witty replies and self-deprecating humour. But the session I liked very much was ‘India and Her Futures’ with Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla (the man behind HLF) in conversation with Gopal Krishna Gandhi who kept the audience enthralled with his anecdotes. 

On the last day, on Republic Day, a Monday I sat through just two sessions. The first was the session ‘Murder Most Mysterious’ with Manjiri Prabhu and Reuben Dass talking with Chilakamari Savitha. The next session I attended was the Ajay Gandhi Memorial Valedictory- ‘The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India’ by Gopalkrishna Gandhi in conversation with Bakhtiar Dadabhoy. Once again it was a full house to listen to the statesman reeling out anecdote after anecdote that had everyone laughing. 

At the bookstore in HLF I picked up a copy of ‘Homeless on Google Earth’ by Mukul Kesavan. It had fifty eight short essays on diverse topics like books, literary launches, politics, personalities and other topics. I have started reading the book already on the way home in the Metro. 

I also met some of my friends and had long talks with them during the lunch and at tea. It felt good talking books, writers and literature in a literary festival. It is a wait of a year for the next year’s edition of HLF. 

The Sunday Haul (on 18-01-2026)

 One of my new year resolutions was to buy fewer books at Abids and elsewhere as the house was overflowing with books I am yet to read. But last Sunday once again I had to break the resolutions as I found four books I couldn’t resist buying. It was warmer for this time of the year last Sunday as I set out for Abids.

The hauls last Sunday were in two sets. The first set I found was two volumes of Katha Prize Stories. I found nice copies of ‘Katha Prize Stories: Best of the 90’s’ edited by Geeta Dharmarajan and also ‘Katha Prize Stories: Vol 2’ edited by Geeta Dharmarajan. 

‘Katha Prize Stories: Best of the 90’s’ had fifteen stories, the best of the previous ten volumes chosen by a panel of writers. Some of the stories were by M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Sundara Ramaswamy, Dilip Chitre and others. 

‘Katha Prize Stories: Vol 2’ had nineteen stories and some of them were by Jayamohan, Vivek Shanbag, Gopinath Mohanty and others. One of the stories in this volume ‘Little Earthquakes’ by M.T.Vasudevan Nair is in the above ‘Best of the 90’s’ volume. 

Somehow I hadn’t come across many books by Indian booksellers so far but last Sunday I found two titles that were by Indian booksellers though I was not familiar with their names. The first title I found was a copy of ‘Struggle All the Way: Story of a Book Seller’ by D.R. Krishna Murthy that I got for just fifty rupees. 

Later after an hour-long chat about books, movies, travel with two friends in ‘Bench Café’ I started for home and spotted a copy of ‘A Life with Books: An Autobiography’ by Balakrishna Marar

The Sunday Haul (on 11-01-2026)

 

There seems to be no giving up on buying books even in 2026 despite a decision I made not to buy any more books at least for a couple of months. So, last Sunday, when I spotted a book with a seller in the RTC X Roads I felt I had to buy it. I found a nice copy of ‘Banaras: City of Light’ by Diana L. Eck that had a nice plastic jacket sealing the cover. I had found a copy of ‘India: A Sacred Geography’ by Diana L. Eck sometime back though I haven’t read it yet. I plan to read ‘Banaras’ along with other books on Banaras like ‘Aimless in Banaras’ by Bishwanath Ghosh I had found sometime back, and also ‘Varanasi’ by the famous Malayali author, M. T. Vasudevan Nair. I bought Diana L. Eck’s book on Banaras for hundred rupees.

Travel books seemed to the theme of my haul last Sunday as I found yet another travel title. I spotted a small sized book in a corner with the Penguin logo. When I picked it up for a closer look I read on the cover the title ‘Letters from Italy’ by Goethe. I was thrilled to find it and more thrilled when the seller asked just twenty rupees for it. It is so short that it can be read in just under an hour or so. I stopped adding more titles to my haul after this find and came back home.  

Two Sunday Hauls

 The Sunday Haul (on 28-12-2025)

The last Sunday haul at Abids was a nice copy of a book that wasn’t on the pavement at Abids. As a regular at Abids some sellers call me and ask me if I want to see some books they have. Usually, they have these books in a bag or a carton which they show to only a few select buyers. So last Sunday one seller called me and showed a carton full of books that he took out one by one. A book with a beautiful cover caught my eye and I asked him to take it out. 

It was a copy of ‘The Novel To-day’ by Anthony Burgess that was a slim book. The ‘Today’ in the title was spelt ‘To-day’ that seemed different. I got it for a hundred rupees. I bought it not to disappoint the seller though I had told myself I wouldn’t buy any at Abids last Sunday.

The Sunday Haul (on 04-01-2026)

Despite my decision not to buy anything at Abids on the first Sunday of the New Year I ended up buying two titles.

The first title was one that I saw with a seller at Chikkadpally and there was no way I could avoid buying it since it was a book I had been looking for. I picked up the copy of ‘Hyderabad: A Biography’ by Narendra Luther the moment I spotted it. Coincidentally, this was the third title about Hyderabad that I had found in the past few weeks. I got it for a hundred and fifty rupees.

Then later at Abids once again I saw a book that I could not stop myself from buying though I already had a copy of it. I saw a beautiful copy of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ by James M. Cain, a crime classic. The copy I had found years ago was a very early edition with a cover that was torn. This was a different edition and was in a beautiful condition. The fun part was that I got it for only twenty rupees since the seller thought it couldn’t be more than that given it was a slim book. 

The Book Fair Haul-2

 

My next visit to the Hyderabad Book Fair was on Saturday, two days before the fair concludes.  I had missed checking out some second-hand book stalls so I carefully went through what they had on the shelves and managed to find four good titles.

I’ve read almost all books by Bishwanath Ghosh but hadn’t read his ‘Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India’s Holiest City’ that I spotted in a pile of Rs.100 books. All Bishwanath Ghosh’s books are travel books so was ‘Aimless in Banaras’ that I plan to read right away because I like the way he writes about his trips. 

A long time back I had found a copy of ‘Bird by Bird’ by Anne Lamott, a book about writing for aspiring writers. I had found a couple of copies mostly at Abids and when I saw another copy at a stall at the book fair I did not want to leave it behind. 

I thought I knew about all the titles of Marquez and so was sort of shocked to find a new title I hadn’t heard before. I spotted a copy of ‘Clandestine in Chile’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a small pile and it was the cover that drew me to it. It had Marquez’s picture, the face only, on the cover and someone had drawn spectacles and moustache on it with a ball point. Nevertheless, I bought this title about a film director’s clandestine visit to Chile. I felt pleased finding it.

This was the first title I picked up on this day and hesitated before buying it. On an earlier visit I had picked up a similar title about someone’s struggle with cancer, Lisa Ray’s ‘Close to the Bone’ her memoir of her cancer. ‘Not the Last Goodbye’ by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber is also a memoir about cancer but the writer is a doctor and that is what makes it poignant. 

 

My next visit was on the last day of the Hyderabad Book Fair i.e., on 29-12-2025. I had decided to look for two or three titles I had missed buying one of which was ‘Black Skins White Masks’ by Franz Fanon and the other was ‘Trieste’ by Jan Morris. Unfortunately, both titles were not to be seen and the stall keepers were not able to tell me if they had been sold or not. However, I was about to find four good titles. 

One title I found was a copy of ‘Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight’ by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of living in South Africa that had a beautiful cover. The name of Alexandra Fuller sounded familiar and it was only after I got home that I realized that I have her second book- ‘Scribbling the Cat’ that I had found sometime this year I guess. 

One of my interests is to read books by the great literary critics like Cyril Connolly, Edmund Wilson, Frank Kermode, and others like them. I had read about F.R. Leavis somewhere and when I saw the same name on the spine of a book in a lot of books at a stall, I took it out. It was a copy of ‘The Great Tradition’ by F.R. Leavis that I thought I would get cheap. But the seller asked for an astronomical sum for it and after some hard bargaining I got it for six hundred rupees which is still a lot of money but I thought it would be worth it. 

I buy almost every travel title I come across and so when I saw a copy of ‘Three Moons in Vietnam’ by Maria Coffey in a lot selling for fifty rupees only I was surprised because it was by ‘abacus’. They only publish very good travel accounts and I thought I was lucky to find it at such a ridiculously low price. 

I had been seeing a lot of copies of books by Ashok Chopra but hadn’t even bothered to check what they were all about which was sort of silly of me. When I saw a hardcover copy of ‘A Scrapbook of Memories’ by Ashok Chopra in another stall I decided to see what it was all about and was totally surprised to find that Ashok Chopra had been a publisher and it was a memoir. I got it for two hundred and fifty rupees.