Last Friday we found ourselves at Chandigarh airport on our way to Kasauli to participate in the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival (KSLF) that was to be held over the weekend. As our friend and colleague Shobhaa De, a fellow participant put it, the KSLF was pretty unique in as much as she couldn’t recall if there had ever been a literary festival anywhere in the world ‘that honoured a living author’. Khushwant’s sway over the Indian reading public has been unprecedented. Through his fiction, non fiction, editorships and popular column With Malice Towards One and All, he has impacted generations of Indians; long before writers achieved star status, there was Khushwant – larger than life, the dirty old man in the bulb with the whiskey bottle and the girlie pictures (an image that was to be debunked many times at the festival by those who knew him well).