A hack's guide to surviving Jaipur Literature Festival

It's easy to feel a bit overwhelmed at the world's largest free literary festival, which starts tomorrow. It doesn't matter if you're attending it for the first time, or the ninth; each year the crowd seems to swell at the Diggi Palace, the humble, faithful and courtly venue for the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Last year alone, we are told, JLF saw more than 2,45,000 people milling about in the five day course of the festival. This year the high court chucked out a petition, a day before the festival opens, seeking to shift the venue, raising concerns of safety.

(Don't say you weren't warned.)

JLF is not all about books and literature. It is as much about stimulating conversations, music performances, theatre and art, shadowing celebrated writers and thinkers, mobbing celebrities, jostling for space to stand, hear and think, book signings, networking (polite word for schmoozing), partying, waiting for the loo, and controversy-mongering. In other words, it's a tamasha. With something for everyone to write home about.

One redeeming feature about the lit fest is that it still continues to be free. It is also wholly inclusive. In the sea of humanity, you'll find students, aspiring writers, literary agents, book publishers, musicians, linguists, journalists, piss-offs and glad-eyes all bobbing about. It is possible that there will be many who may not even know what they're doing, but never mind those.

The lit fest also doesn't allow itself to be hogged just by world literature. Or another way of putting it, it's not all for the goras.

There's a place for regional writing too, that exhibits the rich linguistic diversity of Indian writing. This year, one of the guests will be Ruby Hembrom, who runs an archiving and publishing house of and by Adivasis. According to festival co-director Namita Gokhale, "Santali is one of the most ancient of languages, and we've ignored it so far."

In all, more than 350 speakers are expected to attend the list fest this time, starring British actor and writer Stephen Fry, acclaimed Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood, 2015 Booker prize winner Marlon James, India's best loved children's writer Ruskin Bond, award winning photographer Steve McCurry (who famously shot the Afghan Girl), along with non-fiction giants Niall Ferguson, Thomas Piketty and Atul Gawande. Deciding which sessions to attend - as five run simultaneously - will be pleasantly infuriating mostly. Not making it to one, despite best efforts, excruciating.

Don't lose hope.

Here's an elementary hack's guide to surviving the Jaipur Literature Festival.

1. Avoid, if you can, sessions with five people on the stage. Given that the time allotted to each session is 45 minutes, leaving aside the 15 minutes they keep for opening it to the audience (more on that later), it barely gives the speaker more than nine minutes to articulate his/her thoughts.

2. If you get a place to sit, claim it and hoard it. Even if it means that you end up sitting through another session. If you decide to get up, be prepared to be swept by the crowd and land at a session you most definitely didn't want to attend.

3. Days can get warm, but the evenings are frightfully chilly. There's always a chance of a spot of rain, somehow. That overpriced tea in a kulhad and pyaaz ki kachori on the front lawns is totally worth it, and keeps you well and going. It beats drinking beer during the day.

4. Avoid question and answer sessions. Or else cringe. (A few years ago, an elderly gent got up and asked Hanif Kureishi if he still felt the pain of being circumcised.)

5. Authors can get grumpy. Writing is solitary work. Don't get too pally. On the year Michael Ondaatje attended, a journalist recalls The English Patient author growling when a fan approached while he was just about to bite into his naan.

6. If you miss a session, don't beat yourself silly about it. You can always stream the sessions on JLF's YouTube channel and the website.