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.
