Sunday, 07 February 2010
18:30 - 19:30
David Sassoon Library Garden
M G Road, Kala Ghoda

The Kala Ghoda Lecture seeks to set the tone of the festival, to focus on the opportunities and challenges ahead of the community that loves books and reading. The inaugural Lecture was delivered in 2009, by Urvashi Butalia, founder of Zubaan Books.

This year, the very popular author Chetan Bhagat will speak about Reaching Out To New Readers.

Mr Bhagat’s first three books, Five Point Someone (2004), One Night @ the Call Center (2005) and The 3 Mistakes of life (2008), have done just that. They have each sold in the neighbourhood of 700,000 copies, redefining the idea of a bestseller in English. While they continue to fly off the shelves, his latest, 2 States (2009), aims to do even better.

From his website:

Chetan also writes op-ed columns for leading English and Hindi newspapers, focusing on youth and national development based issues. Many of the issues raised by Chetan’s columns have been discussed in Parliament and among the top leadership of the country.
Chetan quit his international investment banking career in 2009, to devote his entire time to writing and make change happen in the country. He lives in Mumbai with his wife Anusha, an ex-classmate from IIMA and his twin boys Shyam and Ishaan.