“We probably need to change the name of the award,” said festival director Anil Dharker as he addressed the audience before conferring the title of ‘Poet Laureate’ upon Vikram Seth at the sixth edition of Tata literature Live! “He is a renaissance man — he's a poet, author, artist, does Chinese calligraphy and has written an opera among other things. But luckily when I asked him what he considers himself first, he said poet,” added Dharker before proceeding to presenting Seth the award along with author Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi.
After expressing his gratitude to the festival organisers, Seth went to admit how an honour from a rival literature festival posed a bit of a conflict for him. “I had the honour of getting the lifetime achievement award from a rival festival from the north. I accepted it — even though it sounds funereal and then got the invite to be given the poet laureate and I said yes to that.
I had no idea, being the innocent dilli wala that I am, that this was going to be a turf war,” he said mockingly, referring to the cold turf war that the two major literature festivals engage in. He went on to recite a tongue-in-cheek poem about this conflict that he mailed to the two festival directors Anil Dharker and Bachchi Karkaria. The evening followed with a recitation of some of Seth’s works by the man himself. After touching upon some of his popular works, the poet ended on an emotional note reading a poem dedicated to his father on the latter’s 90th birthday.
