Of all of us on the team, Anil Dharker was the most passionate reader. The study room in his home at Hanging Gardens would be stacked with piles of books from publishing houses,” recalled Antoine Lewis, former assistant festival director, Tata Literature Live for a decade until its last physical edition in 2019, still trying to digest the news.

“Anil was keen to organise a city-based literary festival. The idea was to counteract the belief that people here don’t read. He strongly believed that they did, and wanted to relay this via the festival. There was this stubbornness in his beliefs, and if anyone debated them, he was ready to prove his point 10 times over,” he recalls.