4 min readFeb 13, 2026 10:26 PM IST
First published on: Feb 13, 2026 at 07:33 AM IST
Another day, another tempest in a teapot. This time, over a piece in The Guardian that asks why a country that does not read for pleasure bothers to host a hundred literature festivals. The pushback has been indignant, but really, let us not pretend. The literature festival is not for readers. It is for people who wish to be seen as readers. There is a difference, like the difference between a marriage and a wedding. One involves daily devotion, the other an expensive celebration and a great many photographs.
In the olden days, if one wished to identify as a member of the literati, one had to recite a poignant poem or a couplet or two by a Faiz Ahmad Faiz or a Majrooh Sultanpuri. Now, you only need to quote the location of a festival.
You go, you sit, you may even listen, though it is not strictly required. The point is to have been there, in the same general atmosphere as a writer, which apparently imparts a sort of intellectual perfume, like sitting near a lady wearing mogras.
Now, they will tell you India reads. And so it does, if one counts textbooks, academic tomes, exam cribs, and those dreadfully earnest volumes on how to succeed in business. The country is drowning in print, but most of it is meant not to fill the mind but the pocket. It is literature as a ladder, each rung stamped with a certificate. Reading for pleasure? It is a hammock. And hammocks are for those who can afford to recline.
The festival or book fair, then, is the hammock brought to life and decorated with fairy lights. It is where we go to pretend that our reading is not utilitarian or purely performative. Where the man who spends his year buried in tax code can stand in the sun and discuss poetry. Where the woman whose every waking moment is budgeted between board meetings and bedtime stories can briefly discover that stories are not a duty, but a delight.
And who gets to swing in that hammock? Not our poor, who are too busy being poor. Not the student mortgaging her future on textbooks. Not the clerk parsing manuals for promotion. Certainly not the woman for whom “leisure” is the five minutes before the pot boils. No, the festival, much like the concept of reading for pleasure, is for those whose lives contain spaces of time and privilege.
So when the writer of the aforementioned article points out that the festival and the habit of reading for pleasure are not the same thing, she is merely stating the obvious, albeit in the way a skeleton is obvious once the skin is peeled back. One prefers the skin.
We love a festival because it is a satisfying substitute for the real thing. It provides all the sensation of culture without the inconvenience of thought. It is the theatrical version of reading, all costumes and lights, but the script is optional.
Do not ask me when I last truly lost myself in a book. I could not possibly tell you. I have been far too busy attending discussions on them. One must have priorities, after all. These festivals are such work.
The writer is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express. aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com
