You see, I’ve realised that I am old-fashioned. Every day, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that I am out of touch with today’s reality. Let me take you through my slow descent in certain areas. Take the writing of books. Like I thought when I was growing up, that in order to write a book, fiction or non-fiction, a novel or a short story, you needed kum se kum one qualification — to be able to write. To string words together skillfully, create word pictures, and subtle turns of phrase. You needed that certain gift. Now, I realise how wrong I was. Today, every Tom, Dick and Chetan is writing a book. My dentist, my dermatologist, my doodhwala have all found publishers. And then there are literature festivals, lit fests as they’re called. These literary fairs were meant, I thought, to be about literature. You see, I majored in English Literature. I studied the works of Messrs Chaucer, Byron, Blake and Hemingway and for light reading, Virginia Woof, serious high-funda stuff. Chalo, I accept that literature had to simplify a tad bit, and India produced great litterateurs, in Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. Suddenly, lit fests are mushrooming in every nook and cranny of the country. And are they about literature? Or books? Or reading? I find, to my amazement, that there are panel discussions on India Shining, Incredible India, intolerance, iceberg lettuce and its vitality to fine dining, indie cinema.

Illustration/Uday Mohite