Jog back the memory lane - Teen Deviyan in JLTA couple of year

s back, Faiz and I landed at JLT and had a blast. One of the sessions we attended for laughs was called "Teen Deviyan" featuring three young female authoresses - Ira Trivedi, Anjum Hassan and Meenaxi Madhavan Reddy. Ira owned the session with a whisker-licking easy and Anjum was, really, in the wrong panel altogether and Meenaxi seemed to have a glossophobic attack as she read from her book.
This scouring article appeared on The DNA the next page and ever since I have always kept an eye open for anything by G Sampath. 
I do believe, given that I was a witness, this is brilliant writing. It is brief, simply written, and offers a delicious glimpse of what transpired without turning vicious.
Sometimes, as writers, we tend to overload the text with metaphors and twisted convoluted qualifiers. this article is an exercise how the same can be achieved, even bettered, if the message is intact. 

Time was when writers were scruffy-looking, unkempt individuals, who dressed strangely, smoked endlessly and suffered from alcoholism (or looked like they did). Their glamour most certainly did not - with some exceptions — stem from their looks.

You were attracted to their books before you engaged with their looks. At the Jaipur Literature festival, it’s been the reverse — you run into a wildly pretty woman and then scurry to find out what book she has written. This year, it is strikinghow extraordinarily pretty and well-toned the writer community has become.

Perhaps there is a secret cult of fitness fanatics for whom writing is part of a wholistic ‘wellness’ routine, like pilates and meditation.

How else does one account for the fact that the younger women writers all look like — and have the proportions of — models? As for some of the men strutting about like prize bulls, one gets the distinct impression that they put in more energy into their workouts than into their works.

You can’t help but wonder if there is some kind of inverse correlation between a writer’s looks and the quality of her prose — the worser the book, the more glamorous and attractive an author has to be.

To test this hypothesis out here at the Festival, I decided to rank all the female authors around in terms of their looks (I’m neither qualified nor interested in doing this exercise for male authors).

Right at the top, is former Miss India contestant Ira Trivedi. If a photographer can achieve an orgasm by sheer clicking, many surely attained it this evening at the Diggi palace, as she simpered and flirted with Chetan Bhagat in the session titled ‘Teen Deviyan’.

Her lush dark hair hung exactly as they had been trained to. If only she could have just sat there, like that, forever. No, she had to open her beautiful little mouth.

Anyways (to use a favourite word of Trivedi’s), if you really want to test out my hypothesis for yourself, I invite you to buy her brilliant book, The Great Indian Love Story, and read it — read it right till the end no matter what.