Bhopal Literature and Art Festival attracted a myriad amount of readers

on Mar 28, 2022

The three-day exciting Bhopal Literature and Art Festival was concluded on the 27th of March. As part of the festival, there was a book fair at the venue of the festival. The book fair attracted numerous book lovers.

Those who were managing the exhibition-cum-sale center set up by a publisher at the venue said one of the volumes that the readers fell in love with was ‘From Sarees to Stripes, True Stories of Commercial Pilots of India’. A former pilot, Captain Manisha M Puri, has written the volume that portrays the life of many illustrious commercial pilots in the country and the challenges they came across on flights.

Puri worked for Indian Airlines (Air India from 2008). The first chapter of the book – Flight to Freedom – is the yarn of Captain Puri about how passionate she was about becoming a pilot and how she achieved it with the help of a scholarship of 60 hours of flying given by the Bhopal Flying Club. Her story is no maze of history. No legends. It limns bare facts in an interesting way that kindles a reader’s longing for it. The most fascinating part of her story is how she felt while she was flying at an elevation of 10, 682 feet. It was in Leh, one of the highest altitude airfields in the world. The book also relates to the story of Captain Durba Bannerji. She was the first woman pilot in the country to join a commercial airline in 1966.

Another book that the readers laid their hands on was Surviving Men by Shobhaa De. De speaks about Indian men. She writes, “The fact of the matter is, men don’t really like women all that much. In the word-association game, men are likely to come up with the following: ‘whores’, ‘harlots’; ‘ingrates’; ‘treacherous two-timing bitches….’ De is known for using crisp and prickly.