(A Brief Note on My Participation in the recent Dibrugarh UniversityInternational Literature Festival , Dibrugarh University, Assam, India,March 19-21, 2024)

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India looks at me withboth the stony, relentless stare of some local men from the poor neighbourhood alongthe Brahmaputra river and the open-hearted, pristine smiles of DibrugarhUniversity students. Each of the few days I spent here in this ‘remote’ part ofIndia, I felt myself hanging along the spider web-thin, razor blade-sharp, clear-cutand yet ever-shifting line that separates forces that weigh India down fromthose that pull her forward and upward.

Me staying at the luxuriousHM Resort had on one hand served as a superb protective shield against thenotorious Indian social violence and, on the other hand, encased me in a rigidetiquette framework out of which I always felt want to break free. I alwaysfelt drawn to the ‘real’ India behind these thick, transparent, impenetrablewalls of the luxury offered to me, the ‘real’ India that I felt bothintimidating and wonderful.

Mr. KrishnanSrinivasan, former State Secretary of India, told me he does not believe thatIndia has a future, the dire poverty and lack of education that ravage thegreat majority of its population being to be blamed. “It’s so sad”, he said. Hehas every reason to make this conclusion, of course, having been tormented bythis problem all his life. And yet, looking at the radiant faces of Dibrugarh Universitystudents and scholars turning toward us panelists and trying to answer theirwell-informed, ‘thorny’, highly inquisitive questions and having the honour toget to know their dreams, I’d want to be and remain a stubborn idealist who,despite all those bleakest signs and depressing indicators, keeps on believingthat this enormous country has every reason to believe she has a bright future.

A bright future, notonly for India but also for the whole world.

A lonely ‘old’ wolfwho would always prefer the harsh solitude within the privacy of his vastjungle of literature, I was not that ready to be in the company of suchwonderful representatives of my kind from around the world. I’m always aware,of course, of the fact that quite a few of members of my ‘tribe’ are scatteredall around the world. And yet, meeting them in their ‘real’ version, conversingwith them in the same physical room, and giving them the occasional tap ontheir shoulders, is something radically different from nurturing the company oftheir ‘incorporeal’ souls. Here I am, among them, and I feel that yes, I belongto a tribe, one of the not-that-numerous humans who see what many others don’tsee, think what many others don’t think, feel what many others don’t feel, andtry to do things that many others don’t do, out of a seemingly futile desire tomake the world a better, safer, and more tolerant place to live.

The mere fact thatwe’re all speaking about literature and spiritual values is ‘unusual’ initself: How could ever people like us, normally without any power, strive tooppose quite a large array of utterly real and huge powers that are doingnothing better than spoiling human souls and destroying Mother Earth? And yetwe go on speaking about how we can strive, about our paths, our efforts, ourdreams, our hopes: in a way, we are fighters who dedicate themselves to thecase of preserving humanity.

For this reason, noamount of gratitude would be enough to FOCAL and Dibrugarh University forcreating such an unforgettable event in my life, in our lives. May this spiritlive on forever. 

Me speaking at the session, "The East European Tale", March 20, 2024, at Dibrugarh University, together with Halina Kruk (to the right) and Irena Karpa (to the left), both from Ukraine, and Ashes Gupta (far right) as the moderator.