A new normal chapter

Last year, the Bangalore Literature Festival witnessed a footfall of 25,000 visitors

While we saw many literary festivals embrace and adapt to the online world with ease, the connection visitors share when they watch (in-person) or meet an author they admire is always a special memory. And fortunately, as lockdown restrictions begin to ease across the country, the Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF) now finds itself in a suitable position to make that happen once again.

Anuja Chauhan, Alexander McCall Smith and Sudha Murthy will be part of the event. Pics/Wikimedia Commons

This weekend, in its ninth edition, BLF will take place at the Bangalore International Center, but all sessions will also be live-streamed on Zoom. The organising team started to look at a physical event in October as they realised there was permission for venues to function at 50 per cent capacity. "The festival is an event the city has come to look forward to year after year now. But we are being extremely careful - restricting entry at the venue, ensuring the rooms are ventilated and that people wear masks, and enforcing social distancing," co-founder Srikrishna Ramamoorthy shares.

Srikrishna Ramamoorthy

The team also received a good response after reaching out to authors to participate, and thus have a promising line-up with the likes of Alexander McCall Smith, Jeffrey Archer, Sudha Murthy, Anuja Chauhan, and Asad Durrani. While the international authors will tune into the festival via Zoom, Ramamoorthy informs that every session will have one speaker in the auditorium that will be speaking to those on Zoom. The two choices are made available to the audience, too; while a few hundred can be accommodated at the venue, the rest can log in to the festival from the comfort of their homes.

For the sake of safety, BLF also had to let go of any children's programming this year. But Ramamoorthy emphasises that the festival is a baby step towards a semblance of normalcy, and the biggest takeaway this year, he says, will be a peek into what it means to be writing during a pandemic.

On: December 12 and 13
Log on to: bangaloreliteraturefestival.org

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