Book Brahma Festival 2025 opens with spotlight on South Indian languages, AI

Bengaluru: Literature enthusiasts from across South India flocked to the Book Brahma Festival 2025 as it opened on Friday.

The three-day festival focuses on South Indian languages and features 180 sessions.

On the first day, experts discussed multilingual sensibility, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and women’s literature, and hosted a special session for children.

The festival opened with a ‘Beyond Booker’ session featuring Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi, Kanishka Gupta, and Moutushi Mukherjee, moderated by Swetha Yerram. The panel comprised the team behind the recent Booker Prize winner 'Heart Lamp: Selected Stories'.

Among the highlights was a discussion titled ‘Rooting for the Machine, AI-ML; Demon or Angel?’ with director Hemanth Rao, publisher Sreeja VN, poet Palak Sharma, and journalist Pratibha Nandakumar. They explored AI’s influence on writing, poetry, and cinema.

Hemanth Rao said: “AI is going to shape our present and future. In the next 100 years, we will be completely into AI. What the Internet did in the 90s and took over the world is what AI will do now.”

Palak Sharma said: “Everyone has access to AI, and everyone knows to use it. And in the age of competition, everyone is looking for an edge and people think AI will give them the edge over experience and other things.”

Writers Jayanth Kaikini, Carlos Tamilavan, KR Meera, C Mrunalini, B Jeyamohan, and Suchitra Ramachandran discussed South Indian languages beyond borders and multilingual sensitivity.

B Jeyamohan said: “Nobody can ask me to stop writing in Malayalam because I am a Tamilian. There is a need for ambiguity regarding languages.”

Jayanth Kaikini said: “Such events are important in bringing like-minded people together and to discuss literature.”

Chinnara Loka

A dedicated space for children offered activities to learn about Bengaluru, literature, and culture.

Sushma Nagaraj, a parent at Chinnara Loka, said: “This is an interactive session with both Kannada and English for children to learn their language better. I realised that living in Bengaluru, my son hardly knows anything about the city, so it is a call for us to take him around to authentic Bengaluru spots.”