Jillian on interning at the JLF

Being an Author Liaison at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 seems an impossible task. With approximately 8000 visitors on its first day alone (a weekday, mind you—though apparently there was disappointment as the organisers had expected 20,000), having to find a handful of speakers among the crowd is by far a momentous challenge, particularly for someone who once continually confuses photographs of their own face to be of their dad.

Jillian making friends with the locals in Kolkata

Pratika and I were in charge of herding speakers for every session for the venue called Mughal Tent. Immediately we notice that guests often don’t look exactly like their picture, sometimes even not at all. For the first panel the first two speakers gather themselves in the spectacularly colour-coordinated Author’s Lounge of the festival, but a certain Mr. Jaisal Singh remains missing in action. Pratika and I run up and down the grounds. It is before 11 and already it is waterlogged with waves of eager literateurs from all over the globe. In the chat we are slightly panicked—

ME: Anyone seen Mr Singh?

(later)

PRATIKA: Sukhman, still no sight of Mr Singh

Sukhman is one of the supervisors for the volunteers in the Author Liaison department. Everyday she dresses ultra-fashionably and somehow manages to be both charming and strict with us volunteers. Sukhman offers to call him, since only the supervisors—the other two being Ila and Anisha—get access to the phone numbers of the celebrity guests.

Mr Singh doesn’t pick up.

There is only so much you can do. It’s like helping a friend look for their pet fish after having accidentally dropped it into a large body of fish-filled water. It’s nearly impossible to tell that friend’s fish apart from all the other fish, really. And it isn’t because that they all look the same, but you just don’t have the same level of emotional connection to that particular fish. I think that makes identification an easier and smoother process.

Luckily most of the authors knew to come to the Author’s Lounge to find us as their first point of contact.