Author’s Afternoon II with Jeet Thayil

August 17, 2012: This afternoon Jeet Thayil was the guest in the second edition of the series An Author’s Afternoon that I, as the Trustee of Prabha Khaitan Foundation, have initiated in collaboration with The Taj Bengal and t2 supplement of Kolkata’s leading English daily The Telegraph and Siyahi, a Jaipur-based literary organization.

This time, Mr Debanjan Chakrabarti of the British Council was the anchor and in conversation with author Jeet Thayil whose debut novel Narcopolis got longlisted for the Booker.

Thayil, who is the son of Padma Bhushan writer and poet T J S George, spent most of his time abroad and did his masters from a New York college. He is also known as a performance poet, a song writer, a musician and a guitarist.

The programme was held at the Taj Chambers. Everything went of off far better than our expectations. It was a rollicking afternoon adda session as questions and queries came thick and fast as the conversation with the author whetted the guests’ curiosity.

The selected 25 guests from different walks of life really had a gala time and were lucky to get an autographed copy of the book Narcopolis thanks to Shree Cements who joined us for the 2nd edition of this series and helped us to give away complimentary copies of the book to all the guests. Many of them said that the discussion was stimulating and had made them curious enough to look forward to read the book.

The novel Narcopolis is set mostly in Bombay in the 70s and 80s and, sets out to tell the city’s secret history, when opium gave way to cheap heroin. I shall leave for Jaipur tomorrow afternoon as I have to catch a train to Udaipur.
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