Thaindian News

New Delhi, March 6 (IANS) Three delightful young women writers, a breezy spring evening, a brightly lit amphitheatre and a seductive title for a evening discussion! There was fodder aplenty to suffice the literary urges of Delhiites on day 2 of Penguin’s Spring Fever festival Saturday evening.

If the title “Losing my virginity - taking a book to bed” was not provocative enough, the quirky one-liners and straight-faced humour of the authors and some healthy flirtatious interjections by the audience left little to the imagination.

The organisers had very rightly described it a candid chat between author-journalist Kaveree Bamzai and writers Madhuri Banerjee, Ismita Tandon Dhankher and Ira Trivedi on the brochures as it had moments that were scandalous, juicy, earnest and revealing - all rolled into one.

The ball was set rolling by the moderator with an egg-and-chicken question, “What came first, love or sex? Though there were no straight answers to the baffling question, in their own ways the authors at some point agreed that love has a little upper hand in relationships.

It was national-award winning filmmaker Madhuri, with her debut book, “Losing My Virginity and other Dumb Ideas”, who managed to raise the maximum eyebrows, not only because of a tantalizing title, but because the audience was repeatedly told that her book had the juciest bits as compared to the works of other two authors.

With frizzy hair hanging lose around the shoulders, Madhuri, mother of a two-and-a-half year-old, even read out an excerpt from her book, which narrates the tale of a 30-year-old virgin who suddenly lets loose and touches sexual extremes, making love in a hot-air balloon in the process.

She also self-righteously told the audience how it was important for every girl to have five, six guys in her life to make her happy. “Draupati was fortunate, she never got bored,” she quipped.

Then there was the demure Ira Trivedi talking about her third book “There’s No Love on Wall Street. Three books-old, Ira drew from her own experiences in the banking career to lay bare the rosy world of investment banking.

Lastly, there was Ismita, talking and looking pretty as her merchant naval husband filmed her. Her debut book, “Love on The Rocks”, is a story of 25 people cruising on a ship.