One Reason to Attend the Next Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

You'll catch one of the festival unique highlights. Such as this.



The above incident occured during the panel titled "Something to Say", featuring four columnists: Made Wijaya, Shashi Tharoor, Nury Vittachi and Julia Suryakusuma. Deepika Shetty moderated the discussion. The audience could also enjoy a glass of complimentary arak. Enough to fire you up but far from enough to loosen up. So all happened without any chemical influences whatsoever.

In short, Made Wijaya was boring the audience with his long-winded speech and reading. Since Made wouldn't even stop after a couple of hints (Nury pretended to snore, for one), Nury went for more drastic measures with Julia.

And even after all that, Made kept reading.

For the full story, you can read the South China Post article in Nury's blog, or Deepika's post.

Nury's take on the discussion may be the ultimate conclusion of the topic, "[A column]'s not about you. It's about your readers." About the courage to represent readers, Nury himself claimed that he had been sacked six times and sued nine times. Shashi interjected, "And the tenth would be from Julia's husband."

Nury related a story in early 1997, when the Chinese people were concerned about the health of Deng Xiaoping, at the time the leader of Communist Party of China. The government issued an official statement, "Deng Xiaoping's condition is normal for a man of his age." In reaction, Nury wrote in his column, "The normal condition for a 92-year-old man is DEATH." And fate showed that it has a sense of irony. Not long after that, Deng Xiaoping passed away. And so Nury got himself into some troubles.

He finished on this note, "A column isn't just a privilege. It's something that you must use, to get sacked or sued for."