HYDERABAD: The three-day Hyderabad Literature Festival (HLF), which started on January 29 and concluded on Sunday, received good response. The event invited over 30 speakers and was held online because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Saturday saw celebrities like Sidhartha Mallya, son of Vijay Mallya, who spoke on ‘Mi-nding the Mind’. During the discussion with actor Samir Soni, Sidhartha spoke about his book ‘If I’m Honest’, in which he writes about the stigma around mental health. He said that despite all the privilege, he had gone through depression.
“It’s fine to not feel okay. It’s okay to be depressed as the career choice you made when you were 12-14 years old has not worked out. It is okay to fail and to choose the right career path after knowing yourself, in your 20’s or even later,” Sidhartha said. This was followed by a discussion on Des Raj Kali’s novel Shanti Parav which speaks of history, ethnography and politics of the Punjabi Dalit.
Later, author Balaji Vittal and journalist Kaveree Bamzai discussed their books ‘Pure Evil: The Bad Men of Bollywood’ and ‘The Three Khans: And the emergence of New India’. The panel discussion was titled ‘Heroes and Villains’.
Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee spoke not of economics, but about his cookbook, ‘Cooking to Save Your Life’, along with books illustrator Cheyenne Olivier. On Sunday, the fest opened with a panel discussion on ‘Food and Memory’, which saw Anahita Dhondy and Chitrita Banerji in conversation.
This was followed by topics such as Gender and Identity, and Women in Medicine. In another discussion, Women in Cinema, biographer Ritu Menon in conversation with Advaita Kala spoke about her latest book, ‘Zohra Sehgal’ and actor Divya Dutta about ‘The Stars In My Sky’. Ritu said the book discusses the struggle of breaking the conventio-nalities during Zohra Sehgal’s time.
HLF also saw a discussion titled ‘Lest We Forget 1984’ with actor Kuljeet Singh, writer NS Madhavan and professor Rachel Bari. It concluded with a talk on the book: ‘Remo: The Autobiography’ by Remo Fernandes who was in conversation with journalist Nidhi Razdan.