New Delhi, March 7 -- Imagine a literary festival not as encounters with favourite authors or listening to fascinating debates but instead as embarrassing onstage debacles, serialised episodes of misadventures that metamorphose in the mind into a very public pillorying. With this season's calendar of lit fests, in locations as diverse as Jaipur and Thimphu, coming to an end, my bizarre experiences at Sri Lanka's Galle Literary Festival last month reminded me of my accident-prone run on stage.

Consider my first invitation to moderate a panel for the Hong Kong Literary Festival in March 2003. The festival was held amid reports from southern China of a new, often deadly, virus. Within a couple of weeks of the festival, Hong Kong itself was ...