The Hyderabad Literary Festival this year is being celebrated on a much larger canvas. The location has been made convenient and an entire zone in the middle of the city has been demarcated as Literary Street … and Literature and the Arts are dancing to a song of happiness never heard before.

The spirit of the festival is out there in the open for everyone to see…as you walk down a street bedecked with art on both sides of the road…as you listen to strangely intense conversations between the most unlikely of people…as you see the calendar of events that the organizers have put together. But nowhere else is it more obvious and cheerful as it is in Kalakriti, one of the partner venues of the festival.

It is here that the renowned Clay Artist, Potter whatever…Aarti Vir, is part of a day long interactive work shop. The work shop takes the festival straight into the hearts and hands of the people that are attending it as was obvious when I walked into Kalakriti.

The place was choc-a-bloc with people of all ages, sizes, dimensions, nationalities, moods and occupations. Almost everyone was sitting in front of a sheet of newspaper…on which was a small mound of clay. And the brief obviously was, do what your mind tells you to do.

As busy hands translated the thoughts of their minds into hastily molded creations Aarti Vir walked around spreading her special brand of happiness…getting her dose of satisfaction as a young girl put forward something for her approval…advising participants to leave their inhibitions behind…leave their pretentions behind…and to just be.

For there is nothing right or wrong in a translation…nothing wrong in a fanciful flight of fantasy.

And the sounds…oh my God…there was no difference between the sounds that a group of expats were making, sitting casually on the floor…and a group of young students behind a make shift desk…and a group of aunties and grandmothers who must have decided to give adulthood a miss for the day…there were squeals of disappointment, giggles of joy and the oohs and aahs of discovery.

After a while I dragged myself away…thinking how each word had come alive…Hyderabad, because the mood and the spirit was quintessentially Hyderabadi…Festival, because the event was celebratory and Literary, because it was art…even if not in the literal sense.