And it wasn’t all highbrow either. There was Tina Brown attempting to tell the packed audience about the joys of creating a new website (www.thedailybeast.com), though judging by the post-talk questions, she was more renowned here for her memoir on Lady Diana Spencer. And who could miss Condé Nast managing director Nicholas Coleridge being pilloried by strident Indian feminists for daring to use thin models on the cover of Vogue India? (‘Well I am sorry to have to tell you that our readers have a distinct preference for beautiful, slender, six-foot tall models rather than ones that are ugly, short or fat.’)

This was a far cry from the traditional literary festival, which first came into existence in the spa town of Cheltenham in the late Forties. After that, literary festivals were spin-offs either of music or arts festivals, such as Edinburgh or Adelaide, before they took hold in their own right with the launch of the Hay Festival in 1988. The problem with the traditional literary festival is that it is usually just a vehicle to sell books and the closest to any excitement is when the author fluffs his lines while reading an extract of his latest work.

Perhaps the apogee of the celebrity side of literary festivals was when Hay spent £100,000 to have Bill Clinton speak in 2001. By contrast, in Jaipur no one was paid a fee and, more to the point, the entire festival was free to attend. To cap it off, excellent Indian cuisine was served to thousands of participants free of charge and superb live music was performed into the small hours every night. Instead of relying on entrance fees, the Jaipur Literary Festival has managed to shame or cajole institutions like the company that built the Delhi-Gurgaon Freeway into becoming major sponsors along with the usual suspects such as the British Council, the Rothschild Foundation and Oxford University Press.