At the end of his stay in Pakistan and India, the Slovak bestselling fiction author Jozef Banáš attended a writer-reader meeting about his novel Jubilation zone (published in Hindi by the publishing house Samayik Prakashan in New Delhi in 2013), which took place at the Embassy of Slovak Republic on July 20th, 2014. Although the meeting was scheduled for a Sunday evening, representatives of Indian intellectuals arrived and among them one of today´s most influential philosophers – professor of philosophy at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi – Satya P. Gautam. 

He described his feelings to the Slovak author as follows:

Dear Jozef Banas,

Thanks for your kind and affectionate words which I found touching and encouraging. Let me say that it was my good fortune to be invited by Amrit Mehta and the Slovak Embassy to meet and listen you.

Your response to some of the questions made me go back in the memory lane of the days of 1968. I had lived that Spring with great hopes about the possibility of socialism with a human face.

I have completed reading your novel, and I can see the autobiographical dimension of your narrating the last four decades of the 20th Century, and the intriguing structure of the idiocy of world politics during the era of Cold War.

I shall look forward to reading your other works when the same are available in English and/or Hindi.

Thanks for keeping in touch and with personal regards
Yours, Satya P. Gautam.