From Jaipur, With Love

ooms into an explosion of color, excitement and festivities as preparations for the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival begins. The festival, which had its inaugural edition in 2006 has only since grown exponentially each year, pulling in ever expanding crowds to enjoy stimulating and intellectual sessions of the most impressive line ups of authors and speakers from all over the world. Novelists, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winning authors and journalists, Man Booker Prize winners and even personalities and public figures like Oprah Winfrey and His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama have held sessions over the five-day festival over the years, and each coming year just seems to outdo the previous.

Jaipur, on its own, is a quaint city with majestic palaces, forts, archways and traditional Rajasthani culture that has thrived over centuries. The first thing that strikes you is the multitude of colors that sweeps across your visual horizon. Clothing, handicrafts, jewellery, architecture, even the color of the sky in Jaipur seems to glow with bright and distinctive hues. It feels like color is a part of the city’s identity, jumping out at you, making sure it has your attention.

Jaipur is often called the Pink City. In the 1800s, under the Rule of Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh, the entire city was painted and dressed in pink to welcome Edward, Prince of Wales, when he visited the region. Pink was considered the color of hospitality in Jaipur, and much of the city still honors this tradition.The architecture inspires awe at the sheer elegance of the structures and at the thought that must have gone into designing it. The royal, distinguished Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Wind), Sawai Ram Singh’s Palace and Diggi Palace, the venue of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, are only a few of the uncountable heritage structures that dot the expanse of the city.

The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival has found its place in this charming city that you can fall in love with, and will continue to flourish in the years to come. But this year, Jaipur witnessed the Jaipur Literature Festival extend and take a leap across continents, first to Southbank, London, and now to sunny, beautiful Boulder, Colorado! The festival carries with it the same exuberance, brilliance and love for literature and the spoken word as the initial one, and will bring a serving of the magic abroad that those in Jaipur get to experience.

Boulder, with its 300 days of sunshine, is the perfect locale for JLF@Boulder, and brings its own charm to the festival. Held at the beautiful Boulder Public Library, this two-day festival promises to enrich, enthrall and enchant each who walks in, and somewhere, we’re pretty sure, Jaipur couldn’t be happier.