Origins of the Theatre of the Absurd
After Beckett, it was Ionesco has the greatest impact on the Theatre of the Absurd. But Ionesco is different from Beckett. Unlike Beckett, who tutored himself into the phenomenon of the absurd under Joyce’s influence, Ionesco was jolted into it by a sudden mystical experience.
One day as he was taking a stroll, he claimed that he had an experience in which his notions of time and space broke down. This experience taught him the inherent absurdity of the world, time and space. After it, his art also grew on these lines. He developed drama in which time, space, logic and language had no meaning. He taught it by mutually contradictory statements, self-contradictory statements and absurd and fantastic situations.
In Rhinoceros, there is logician whose logic is absurd.
Old Gentleman: So then, logically speaking, my dog must be a cat?
Logician: Logically speaking, yes,but the contrary is also true.
Berenger: Solitude seems to oppress me, and so does company of other people.
Daisy: You were both wrong.
Old Gentleman: Even so, you were right.
The absurdity of life is expressed in these lines.
Life is an absurd business. P 19
In the continuation of Brecht’s effort to break the fourth wall, Ionesco uses self-reference in Rhinoceros. P.23
He breaks the conception of normal and abnormal in Rhinoceros.
“Dudard: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality? Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that.”
The beastly instincts of humanity are taking over and everyone is turning into a rhinoceros, a wild creature who has no semblance with the cultured individual which we are fond to think of. The Absurdists employed their techniques not only on the subject matter and content, but to their craft too. Not only dialogues between the characters are ambiguous and absurd, but even the stage instructions are contradictory.
A similar small play is Future Is In the Eggs. A trap-door may or may not open; or perhaps the stage may or may not slowly collapse, and the characters – all unwittingly – gently sink and disappear without interrupting their actions – or jut quite simply carry on, according to the technical facilities available. P. 141.
Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution – A Fine Collection of Art by the Old Bolsheviks
Like other Annals of Communism books, Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution is for the serious students of the history of Russian communism. It shows us the lighter side of the ‘comrades’; the kind of jests they used to play on each other, particularly in making caricatures. This book is a collection of these caricatures and portraits. It mostly describes the period before the Great Terror, before the iron regime of Stalin stifled all intellectual imagination. Most prominently it features the wit and art of Bukharin, the man who, according to Solzhenitsyn, was capable of stemming the bloody run of the Communists in Russia.
As a student of Stalinist history, it came to me as a surprise that humor was still possible under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This book shows that even under extreme duress, human creativity breaks out in the most unexpected of places. While describing the underlying brutality of the Communist regime, these caricatures prove the basic premise of Communism wrong: it shows that social engineering is impossible; man can never be bound into ideologies.
The introduction by Simon Sebag Montefiore is very interesting and necessary for going through the portraits and caricatures.
This is not a book to be read in both literal and symbolic sense. The portraits cannot be leafed through at one go. One has to absorb the history underlying these portraits over a period of time, while studying other historical works and contemplating over the life of Communist Russia. Not a volume to be studied in isolation but very useful for those who are deep in the history of Russian communism.
White Collar – An Intellectual Series… finally!
Am finally watching a TV Series again… White Collar. Its from a different class entirely. It is called as a dramady – a mixture of comedy an drama. The Western tradition has always divided drama in comedy and tragedy and to me the division was always wrong and insufficient. Comedies were light, vulgar and non-serious, while tragedy was… well… tragedy! To me it always seemed that there should be another category. That life can not fit in these two categories only. They had tragic-comedy but it was disappointingly nostaligic of the two categories.
Good thing, in telelvision and cinema they don’t bother about these distinctions anymore. White Collar is a comedy, a drama and a thriller. While the focus is on white collar art crime, the way the characters carry themselves is comic. Anyone who has watched Prison Break is more likely to be disappointed in other crime dramas. White Collar is not on the line of Prison Break, but it does involve con men and break outs. Every episode takes on a different story, just like The X-Files. Neal Caffrey, played by Matt Bomer, is a felon, who is working for the FBI, thanks to his excellent brains and his insider knowledge of the criminal world. Agent Burke is the one who is running Caffrey.
The main characters of Neal Caffrey and Burke are excellent. The chemistry between characters is good enough. Side-characters are also very interesting. Mozzie looks genuinely like a computer geek, who loves his geeky freedom of a room filled with silicon chips. Burke’s wife looks sexy and smart in the right proportions. The most important thing is the smart and witty dialogue with smacking of literature. They actually quote from Kafka!
There are side stories going on… Burke is supposed to be a born and bred FBI agent, who not in his mettle when
White Collar is a soft crime drama, one in which the audience is fully confident that nothing wrong will happen. It is watched more for its designer wear, beautiful interiors and stunning sceneries. Lighting and colors are exquisite and every frame is carefully thought out, calculated for an optimum visual effect on the audience. White Collar is thought out as a series of mesmerizing photo-shoots with a lot of effort put into making it look visually captivating. it comes to romance, but he actually looks more lost while playing an FBI agent. Caffrey has a runaway girlfriend whom he is trying to track and who has left him clues. The clues dawn on Caffrey one at a time, at the end of every episode.
And it is not dirty. In this age of television series where even male frontal nudity is not a taboo, it is nice to see a series which can be watched by even kids. There is no nudity at all and even the kisses are hard to come by. And of course, no rough language, no four letter word. White Collar is truly a series for the intellect and for the sophisticated elite minds. Hope it continues!
The Sound of the Mountain – Most un-Japanese of Kawabatas
The Sound of the Mountain is the most western of all the works of Kawabata. It lacks the haiku-like feeling which Snow Country and Thousand Cranes give. It is the story of a post-war Japanese family undergoing modernization. The story is told from the point of view of a sixty-year old writer who is the head of the family. He has a daughter, Fusako, who has a disastrous marriage and has come back to live with him and a son who has a beautiful wife, for whom Shingo has feelings himself. His son Shuichi is also having an extra-marital affair.
The novel centers on the internal struggle of Shingo regarding his feelings for his daughter-in-law. The sound of the mountain is heard only twice during the novel. It is considered as an evil omen in Japan. Shingo takes it as an omen for the breakup of his overtly calm family, which has otherwise tumultuous inner life. He is struggling against his feelings for his daughter-in-law, while his son is having an affair despite having a beautiful wife at home. His daughter-in-law aborts her baby as a vengeance against her husband. Shingo’s daughter is also a mess and a nuisance for the family.
The Sound of the Mountain is a story of the gradual breaking-up of traditional social order in Japan. In the background there is dismay and the dejection of the defeat in the Second World War. It is a story about a society which is Japanese in externals but is slowly modernizing and westernizing, and with it comes the mental tumult.
It is also a story about the internal struggles of an aged writer who has no spiritual background and who has half spurned the traditional Japan.
As is usual with Kawabata, the novel is sprinkled with talk about art, western and Japanese. It is not like Snow Country or Thousand Cranes but like any Kawabata reader I loved it. Who cares if it is not truly Japanese? Whatever Japan is left in it is good for a fan. And I obviously am a fan of Kawabata.
The Master of Go – A Very non-traditional Novel
The Master of Go is not a novel in the traditional western sense. It is a piece of reporting of the game of Go, a game like chess, but infinitely more complex.
The game is between an aged master and a newbie. The whole novel traces the developments of the game which goes on for days and at last the newbie defeats the master quite unexpectedly.
Behind the lines depicting the real game of Go, it is the story of the decay of traditional Japan and its defeat at the hands of the modern western thought systems. The master represents the traditional Japan, and his defeat symbolizes the end of that Japan.
“The Master seemed like a relic left behind by Meiji.”
The disciple who is more rational in his thoughts represents the modern West and its excessive stress on rational and logical faculties of man.
“Otake’s manner, as he repeatedly threatened to forfeit the match, carried suggestions of an inability to understand the courtesies due to an elder, a want of sympathy for a sickman, and a rationalism that somehow missed the point.” P. 55
For Japan, the game of Go is not just a game, but an exercise of their whole civilization, a miniature dynamic model of Japan, but for the disciple and the West, Go is just a game.
“The Oriental game has gone beyond game and test of strength and become a way of art. It has about it a certain Oriental mystery and nobility.” P. 117.
Though the master is defeated, but the disciple is not give credit for his game which is not quite Japanese in flavor.
“One could see in the divergence a spiritual incompatibility, and perhaps something physiological as well. The Master too was known as a careful, deliberate player.” P. 156.
The Master of Go is too technical for most of the reader who are not familiar with the game of Go, but the background undertones makes it worth reading for anyone.
Thousand Cranes – My favorite Kawabata
Thousand Cranes is perhaps the best work of Kawabata, as good as Snow Country. It is written in prose but has the touch of poetry. The haiku like quality of Kawabata’s prose is made even more beautiful by the tea ceremony descriptions. Deeply Japanese in form, it makes a very strange read for the non-Japanese reader. But this strangeness is rendered beautiful by Kawabata and the post-war turmoil of the modern Japan gives it a common ground with the modern West. The elaborateness of the tea ritual can astonish a western reader in which the cups in which the tea is taken are very important. There are sister-brother, man-wife cups and so on…
The photographic images given by Kawabata are etched into my memory. Those scenes are unforgettable.
The story is of the son of a wealthy merchant. The novel begins with the tea ceremony in which Kikuji is invited by a mistress of his dead father. There he is involved into an affair with a rival of Chikako, Mrs. Ota. He meets a beautiful girl with a kimono of cranes. The image is deeply etched in Kikuji’s and readers memory. The novel is a series of tea ceremonies and Kikuji’s relations with and feelings for three women.
Japanese art, modern and traditional resurface all over the novel, at meaningful places. For a reader unfamiliar to the Japanese history, it’s hard to make connections, but otherwise these connections are important.
Japan was untouched by post-modernism before the war, but post-war writers like Kawabata are influenced by it and in Thousand Cranes we see some ugly images described in detail, as would be very unorthodox for a traditional Japanese writer.
Thousand Cranes is one of the representative works of Kawabata and the post-war Japanese writing, with post-modernism, Japan balanced in proper manner.
Snow Country – The Best of Yasunari Kawabata
Snow Country is the most representative of Kawabata’s work, with its haiku like structure. Snow Country is a story of a Japanese writer and a geisha. But anyone trying to find a traditional story of a man having an affair with a geisha will be disappointed. The setting is completely different; very Japanese. He visits his geisha in a mountain spa, hidden deep under the western mountain range of Honshu.
Snow Country is not just to be read. It is to be felt. It is to be felt in the train journeys of the hero to the spas. It is to be felt in the walks taken near the spa. It is to be felt in the fleeting images which flash throughout the novel, images which are juxtaposed with actual situations.
Snow Country is contemplation over beauty and its impact on the observing individuals. It is sad, but in a different way. It is a deep and intense observation of beauty, yet this beauty does not bring happiness. The overwhelming beauty ultimately turns into sadness.
It is not indicated by Kawabata, but the way beauty turns into sadness in his novels in general and in Snow Country in particular, it tell us of a society in which individuals can no longer bank on their spiritual heritage. That heritage seems to be receding into a past, a past which is yearned for, but can no longer be brought back. Snow Country is an elegy of wasted beauty, of beauty spoiled by its own excessiveness.
Almost Live from JLF 2012 – Day 3
I had seen the consequences of arriving one session late on the second day so on day three I was right in time for the first session. But the JLF was being inundated. Even before the first session people were swarming on the check post.
The first session I attended was ‘The Superpowers of the 21st century’ with Thant Myint-U of Burma, Geling Yan of China, David Malone, the Canadian ambassador to India and Shashi Tharoor.
When I first looked at the session details I was dismayed to find Tharoor on the panel. To me he always works best as a program dampener, but this time he was useful. Due to huge crowds at the check post I was about ten minutes late, but Tharoor was 20 minutes late, so when I arrived the session still hadn’t started and I found a comfortable enough seat.
Tharoor began by reinstating his friendship with Malone and Myint-U and as usual started with the romantic notion that 21st century was no longer the century of the superpowers, that it was the century of trade and democracy. Brushing aside the romanticism, Myint-U told that the U.S. is still a superpower in many regions, including the Pacific; that there are many other geographical areas where superpower influence still can not be denied. He also emphasized that predicting the future in this way was a risky business.
Summing up the thesis of his book Where China meets India – that with changing of geography in Burma and the neighboring states of India and China, geopolitics is also changing – Myint-U said that Chinese influence in Burma was increasing with every passing day. Over 2 million Chinese from the neighboring Chinese state of Yun-nan had immigrated to Burma in the past two decades. China is building huge ports and fast track railways in Burma. The next couple of decades will be very crucial for Burma and for the entire South Asia region. China may convert Burma into its province and Indian Ocean its local pool.
India, on the other hand, is now barely a presence in Burma. Though there has been an increase in trade between the two countries, China is the more visible and decisive influence in Burma. Myint-U said that the reasons behind this difference is that while Yun-nan, the Chinese state neighboring Burma has seen a lot of development and a decrease in its ethnic and religious tensions, the north-east region of India is still an underdeveloped region economically and with ever-increasing ethnic and sectarian violence.
To that Tharoor responded with another clichéd romanticism that Burma had been always been a focus of India too, quoting Nehru’s ‘Look East’ policy to the effect.
David Malone said that while India is already a recognizable international power, it has barely learned to respond to international situations. During the ‘Arab Spring’ India was totally lost as to what should be its policy towards individual countries of the Arab Spring. It was trying to be good to everyone and consequently was lost. It was a fine demonstration of the fact that India had virtually no foreign policy.
Baithak is the best venue of the Festival. It gives the feeling of shelter and openness at once. Colorful twilight coming through the tents adds to the atmosphere. The second session The Question of Jerusalem with Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sari Nusseibeh and Jonathan Shainin was there. The discussion was mainly in the context of the book Jerusalem: the Biography of a City by Simon Sebag Montefiore with the Palestinian ‘thinker’ and ‘activist’ Sari Nusseibeh thrown in for ‘balance’ and ‘variety’.
Simon started by stating the importance of Jerusalem in history, calling it a fulcrum where conflicts like Israel vs. Palestine, Secularism vs. Fundamentalism raging unceasingly.
Responding to the question of Shainin about how did he come up with the idea of writing a book about Jerusalem, Simon responded that Jerusalem being the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity and one of the most important city of Islam, was always a fascination for him. He wanted to read a book about Jerusalem, about its people, its structures and its conquerors. But he couldn’t find such a book. So he decided to write one, quoting ‘In a way reading is writing.’
When Shainin asked Sari about the importance of history for Jerusalem, Sari replied that for him history does not weigh much on the present and an individual like him was just trying to find a way to live a normal life. Sari had an air of affected aloofness, a sort of artificial objectivity of a deliberate intellectual. Though he goes farther than any Palestinian commentator in recognizing that there was originally a Jewish temple in Jerusalem and dares to go beyond the literal translation of the episode of Muhammad flying to Jerusalem on Al-Burraque, the liberalism only goes this far.
I wonder whether the rejection of history as an important factor, Sari was trying to avoid confronting it as history is not on the side of the Palestinians. Israel was the homeland of the Jews and at the first place, Christians and Muslims had driven them away from their land.
Replying to Sari’s romanticism, Simon said that history really does matter in general and also in this particular case to which Sari said that history which does violence to the daily life of the common man today should not matter much.
Sari went poetic and said that he calls Jerusalem as the gateway to heaven because in Muhammad’s journey to heaven Jerusalem was where that he had finally taken off. To him the idea of Jerusalem is celestial because of this. Simon replied that Jerusalem had obvious political dimensions as Muhammad himself had political ambitions and Islam is inextricable from politics from the beginning.
He said that the present rule under Israel is actually a comparatively peaceful one. Under the Ottomans and during the Mongol raids Jerusalem was often a bloody heap. The Ottomans started practicing tolerance only under the Western pressure. Sari had nothing to say to this.
In all it was a very good session, mainly due to the depth of scholarship of Simon Sebag Montefiore. I have not read the book yet, but am definitely going to soon.
It was straight two sessions with comfortable seats for me and God only allows this much to an individual. I had to go to the toilet. The queues at the main entrance of the Festival are only trumped by the queues at the toilets. And as I was inching to the happy emptying of my bladder I had to listen to an Indian woman vociferously lecturing about the extreme plight of sweepers in India like the lady cleaning the toilet there. Both the sweeper and the white lady were clearly uninterested in her raving but when does that deter any modern Indian philosopher? I bet that if they put signs in front of the toilets saying Indians can lecture here, more than half of the crowd problem will be solved.
Anyways it whole process took about 20 minutes and when I finally reached for my intended third session at the smallest venue of Durbar Hall to listen again Thant Myint-U on the topic Aung San Suu Kyi and the Future of Myanmar, it was already more than full. There was no room for even standing. I lingered for a couple more minutes and then headed for the Festival Book Shop. This has become my daily ritual at the Festival now. Today I bought the cookie again, but also bought a book, Cairo – The City Eternal by Max Rodenbeck as it was actually cheaper there than at flipkart, a rare thing.
After paying I went back to Durbar Hall and found that the question answer session was coming to an end. Thant was answering to a question about the awareness of the trouble in Indian North-East in the Burmese population, to this Thant replied that the Burmese population was not informed about the situation in Indian North-East as there are simply no connections. After the session was over, I followed Thant back to the signing area and got my book signed and what more; I even got a picture with him.
The next post-lunch session was again in Durbar Hall. As I had already taken lunch, I occupied the best seat I could get, which was in the third row. The topic was Public and Private Portraits: The Biographer’s Art involving Joseph Lelyveld, Sugata Bose, Peter Popham, David Remnick and Simon Sebag Montefiore. As I have mentioned earlier, I don’t really like biographies a lot but as both David Remnick and Simon Sebag Montefiore were on the panel, I decided to attend the session.
Responding to Sugata Bose’s question about difficulties in writing a biography Simon responded that the problem of access of archival material is always a spectre looming close while working in the former Soviet Union. He expressed it very poetically saying that although the warm Kremlin Sun did shine upon him sometimes but he also felt the cold winds of Tundra coming out of the Kremlin.
He said that timing in Russian Federation is often critical and when he came out with his book in 2000 Putin was very unhappy with the book. Not surprisingly, he was blacklisted for some years. Simon was actually the writer who made the session ticking. Carrying forward the point raised by David Remnick that why lives of famous personalities get written again and again, Simon said that when he was not satisfied in calling monsters like Stalin and Hitler just as psychopaths. Just calling them psychopaths won’t explain their coming to power. He had to look deeper into the origins of these monsters and the result was Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
Commenting upon Obama, David made an interesting point. He said that coming to power and exercising power are not same things. Successfully winning an election does not guarantee that the exercising of power will also be smooth. He also added that biography is a strange, lonely and different kind of experience. With some questions the session came to an end. Though I had scheduled to attend one more session on this day, but my mind was full of the thoughts from previous sessions and so I slipped out at 03:30.
Almost live from JLF 2012 – Day 2
Looking at the schedule I knew that Day 2 was going to be busier. And it was. The first day at JLF 2012 had about 3000 visitors. The second day attracted near about 5000. The way the numbers are increasing every year at Jaipur Literature Festival, I wonder how long before it will stop being literary.
I meant to visit the very first session at Front Lawns – Creativity, Censorship and Dissent’ with the Kashmiri writer Siddharth Gigoo in it, but couldn’t make it. I was even late for the second and the most important session of the day – A Good Man in Africa – a panel discussion of four travel writers about Africa. Travel, writing and Africa… that’s the combination for me! Besides Tim Butcher, the author of Blood River and Chasing the Devil, it had Philip Marsden, Philip Gourevitch and Illja Trojanow. The discussion was moderated by Taiye Selasi.
I was late and the students had crammed every corner of Baithak, the venue where the discussion took place. And so I had to remain standing. The discussion was about foreign writers in Africa. Philip Gourevitch came out heavy on the charges of some of the Africans that outsiders can not know Africa well and will always write superficially. He said that if he is genuinely concerned about Africa, and spending time and effort to understand it then how is he an outsider? He also added that if they want to draw such lines of then it will mean that the Africans too will remain outsiders in the West.
Illja Trojanow said that if Africans are not going to write about themselves then somebody will. There really is no reason to complain. It was also mentioned that Africans have very good oral traditions. They are amazingly accurate in their descriptions, regarding time and place. but they do not have a written literary traditions and that is the gap which the authors like them are trying to fill.
Trojanow said that one problem in writing about Africa is that the colonial terminology has not yet been replaced. The writers, both African and non-African are using the terminology of their former colonial masters. He said that this needs to be broken.
Butcher said that often Europeans try to categorize African problems in very simple terms, like which tribe attacked which one? He said that the reality is much more complex, but it indeed is necessary to learn about this tribal structure in depth, as this is very the subtle details will surface.
In all, it was a very good session, at least to me. Though I had to stand, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The 12:30 PM session – The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, was the highlight of the day. It was held in the Front Lawns and was jam packed. Again I had to stand. Pinker summed up his thesis in his new book by the same name as the session with a slide show.
His thesis is that contrary to the public perception, the evil tendencies of human nature have actually decreased in the modern times. He backed up his thesis with enormous amount of statistical data explained with colorful maps and graphs.
First he showed that evil tendencies are decreasing gradually and then he told about some of the plausible reasons behind the decrease. Education, democracy, and freedom of expression were some of the reasons behind the decrease, according to Dr. Pinker.
And guess what? The ubiquitous Barkha Dutt was there to interview him. Barkha, our very own Barkha, that poor girl who barely does anything other than grilling politicians in her life, asking questions from the foremost cognitive psychologist of the world? The galls they have!
At 2:30 PM, due to lack of options and because of the fatigue of standing in two continuous sessions I had to sit through the horrible session of ‘The Chutneyfication of English’ with Rita Kothari, Tarun Tejpal, Gurcharan Das and Ira Pande.
Tarun was late and the ladies started talking nonsense to the public from the first minute. Then Tarun dashed in with a ridiculously macho entry. The whole talk was hokum. I always get sick with the talks of the new brand of English in India, variously called as Indlish, Hinglish Inglish etc. Most of these so-called writers in India barely master Standard English, and they talk about making their own brand?
Sometimes I also feel that it is perhaps the inability to master a foreing language that is converted into desperate attempts at creating their own brand. That way mediocrity can pass as creativity.
Tarun read one chapter from his fiction (yes, he is a littérateur these days!) in which he told about the pain of an Indian boy studying English. Tarun invented a sort of gibberish for this character and while reading from his book, actually used the word for ass in Hindi. It was a disaster.
The next session – In Defense of Enlightenment was much more important with Steven Pinker and A C Grayling. As I haven’t read A C Grayling I could not relate with his talk but still it was an interesting session. Pinker stated some points from his books The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works. Based on his experimentation he said that race is an entirely a social construct and there are more differences between individuals of a same nation than between the average individual of one ‘race’ and that of the other ‘race’. Echoing the socio-biologists he said that humans are fallible; that brain is a system prone to error and to completely purge them of evil is impossible.
He said that to continue the course of Enlightenment it is necessary to continue with reason. He also made a very important point that sometimes not only our eyes, but our minds also perceive wrong things. He called them cognitive illusions and he asserted that it is necessary to penalize these cognitive illusions in order to save humankind from their consequences. I wonder whether it was a direct reference to the cognitive illusions in the limbic system.
When someone from the audience parroted the cliché that science and religion are just two ways of finding the truth, A C Grayling very politely brushed her argument away by saying that there are more fundamental differences between their approaches than there are any similarities.
I was expecting the last talk to be the most interesting as it was named Open Road – a discussion of travel writers and travel writing. Six travel authors were on the stage – Samanth Subramanian, Philip Marsden, William Dalrymple, Tim Butcher, Katie Hickman and Akash Kapur. The original plan was that every author will first read for five minutes from his book and then there will be general discussion with the audience. The authors took more time than stipualated (now why doesn’t that surprise me?) and at last there was no more time to ask questions. It was sad as this was the first session in which I was itching to ask a question. I had grabbed a third row seat with great personal cost as when I left the venue my bladder was about to burst.
Samanth read from his part memoir, part travelogue – a part about faith healing at his grandfather’s home. As is with modern Indian writers he was keen in the book and on the stage to show his skepticism about faith healing. I say, if one is so skeptical, then why take such an issue?
Marsden read from his book on Ethiopia and the Christian community there. Reading out from the passage of his travel to the remote mountain monasteries he held the audience in fascination for about five minutes.
William Dalrymple then boisterously read his piece from his From a Holy Mountain. It was a comic piece about the absurd literal beliefs of an Orthodox Christian priest in the Middle-East. Although the piece was very good, I wondered that how is it possible that an author travels to a country like Armenia and fails to focus on the overwhelming tragedy which befell over it?
Tim Butcher read from his book Chasing the Devil and read out a passage with his encounters with the good and the bad devils in Liberia – something about local lore and tradition.
Katie and Akash Kapur were boring at best, but at least Katie finished early!
That was it for me at the second day.
