Arvind Adiga bags the Man Booker Indo-Asian News Service Indian writer Arvind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards, for The White Tiger - his debut novel set against the backdrop of India's growing wealth gap. Adiga took the 50,000-pound ($87,000-dollar) prize for a book described by the chairman of the judges as revealing "the dark side of India" at a glittering ceremony on Tuesday night in London's Guildhall attended by the literary who's who of the British capital. The 33-year-old former journalist said his book - the story of Balram Halwai, a village boy who becomes an entrepreneur through villainous means - aimed to highlight the needs of India's poor. "It is a fact that for most of the poor people in India there are only two ways to go up - either through crime or through politics, which can be a variant of crime," Adiga, the fifth Indian-origin writer to win the prize, told the BBC. "These people at the bottom have the same aspirations as the middle class - to make it in life, to become businessmen, to create business empires. They need to be given their legitimate needs - the schooling, the education, the health care - to achieve those dreams. If not, as I said, there are only two ways up: crime or politics." But Adiga said that although India has "an extreme divide between the rich and the poor" his book wasn't a social commentary. "It's an attempt to dramatise this and get it into literature. It's meant to be a fun book and to engage its readers," said Adiga, who beat off competition from five other authors, including fellow Indian Amitav Ghosh, nominated for his Sea of Poppies. Chairman of the judges Michael Portillo said Adiga - only the third debutant to win the award in its 40-year-history - won because judges felt that his book "shocked and entertained in equal measure." "The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." The other shortlisted authors were Steve Toltz of Australia (A Fraction of the Whole), Sebastian Barry of Ireland (The Secret Scripture), and British writers Linda Grant and Philip Hensher (The Clothes on Their Backs and The Northern Clemency respectively). Chennai-born Adiga is the third debut writer to win the award - after DBC Pierre in 2003 for his Vernon God Little and Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things. He is the fifth Indian-origin author to win, joining V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. Adiga, asked about winning the prize in the midst of a financial crisis, said: "India and China have come into their own and the fiction that comes from these countries should reflect the fact. "What that means is writers from those countries need to be more critical in looking at those countries because they no longer need protection. As they step out into the world stage and potentially rule the world, it is even more important." Adiga dedicated the prize to New Delhi, where he has lived for many years. "It's a city that I love and a city that's going to determine India's future and the future of a large part of the world. It's a book about Delhi, so I dedicate it to the people that made it happen," he said. Interviewing Chris Pash Gauri Katyal Thirty years after the closure of the whaling industry in Australia, ex-journalist, Chris Pash, goes back to fill in the gaps in the narrative, through his upcoming book The Last Whale. Here are some excerpts from the interview. NDTV: You were already covering stories on whaling as a journalist. What motivated you to write a whole book on the subject? Chris Pash: I was a cadet journalist in the mid to late 1970s at a local newspaper on the south coast of Western Australia.Albany was then very much a small town but the industry of interest to me was the whaling station, where three ships hunted sperm whales off the edge of the Continental Shelf. This was the last whaling station in Australia and in the last in the English-speaking world. For me, whaling was an oddity, something left over from a previous century. In 1977, I organised to go out with one of the ships, the Cheynes III, to write a feature article for the Albany Advertiser. A couple of months later a mixed band of activists, including Canadian Bob Hunter, the founder and the first president of Greenpeace, arrived to protest against whaling. The challenge to the status quo turned the town on its head. The activists were regarded as ratbags who knew nothing about whales. The issues were the same as they are now: whaling was cruel; man didn't need anything the whale could give; whaling was destroying species after species of whales. The locals saw nothing wrong with whaling. They'd been involved in some form since first European settlement in 1826. NDTV: It's been thirty years that whaling was brought to an end in Australia? What made you write this book now and not earlier? Chris Pash: The activists were crazy and magical at the same time. They took open boats, inflatable Zodiacs powered by outboard engines, 30 nautical miles over the horizon to run interference against the harpoon gunners. There were two close calls, one investigated by police, as the activists used themselves as human shields for the whales. This hit a chord with me. I think there is a part of us that wants to right wrongs, tilt at windmills, and hang the consequences. These people did that. For three weeks in August/September 1977, Albany was the front line in the global battle for the environment. It seemed to me every journalist in the world was there for the protest and I felt that I didn't do a particularly good job. NDTV: What do you think was the turning point in Australia's fight against whaling? How do you place yourself with respect to this? Chris Pash: The turning point in the anti whaling movement was the impact that this activity had on the global price of sperm whale oil. A tip off by wharf workers in North America enabled Greenpeace to turn away a ship of Albany sperm whale oil. Buyers noted the protests and this interference to shipping and started moving to synthetic alternatives to sperm whale oil. The price of sperm whale oil collapsed and the industry wasn't commercially viable anymore. NDTV: Australia has brought an end to whaling. Do you think adequate steps are being taken to stop this (at a global level)? Chris Pash: When whaling ended on November 21, 1978, (almost thirty years ago), the whalers were discarded. They lost their jobs and their status in the town and received nothing in compensation. I felt that they hadn't been given an adequate voice and that their lifestyles should be recorded. Emotions were too raw then to dig deeper into feelings and emotions but at a distance of three decades the time was right. I also felt the anti-whaling activisits did something extraordinary and that they too were forgotten, a blip in news coverage. I felt a responsibility to both groups. NDTV: What is your message to a country like India? Chris Pash: The story is a universal one. It's about a clash of ideas, the old against the new and the key message from the book is that individuals can make a difference. The activists were really a loose band and the core group fewer than a dozen people. They set their minds to the task and brought about change. India's influence on thinking is there. The activists studied Gandhi and they applied direct action in a non-violent way. NDTV: What made you pick up whaling of all the other things? Chris Pash: I was determined to get the book right and present the lives of these two groups of people without comment. I used the structure of fiction - with character building instead of character creation - in a series of scenes. This served to the push the narrative and maintain reader interest. The story is all true, the characters real people and for them this is as close as words can get to reality. I dropped large chunks of the manuscript to ensure the reader's interest is held until the last page but the integrity of the story remains. The extraordinary thing was how open the whalers and activists were. This enabled me to reveal their minds to the world. NDTV: Did you have any horrifying experiences while writing the book? What did you learn? Chris Pash: There were many surprises for me, when I researched the book. For example, I didn't know that one man, a Frenchman, financed the entire campaign out of his own pocket. The process of creating The Last Whale rekindled in me the taste for the hunt: finding people who don't want to be found; uncovering facts and documents. I have for many years now been involved in the business side of news rather than creating stories. I've enjoyed writing The Last Whale. More books are on the way. In Conversation with Chetan Bhagat Gauri Katyal As Bollywood gets ready with film renditions of two of his bestselling novels, a humble Chetan Bhagat got talking to Ndtvbooks.com at Osian’s Cinefan, where he was there to divulge on the celluloid connection between films and novels. Just as the conversation started, we found the celebrated author confessing, “This is the first air conditioned event I’ve done. I launch my books at Big Bazaar. I’ve never done such a fancy event.” While writers go to all sorts of elaborate extents to launch books, Chetan Bhagat is known for choosing middle class places to release his books. Not only that, his books never cross the ninety-five rupees price tag. (Perhaps that is the secret behind cracking the bestseller’s code. Aspiring writers, take note.) As a person, Chetan is no different from most people. Just as many of us hate our jobs, at one point of time Chetan also faced a similar dilemma. And that’s how he got into writing novels. “I pretended that I was working but I started writing a book. I wrote Five Point Someone entirely in the office. I didn’t even have computer at home. I called it Five Point Someone because it’s a very nerdish title, it was not done with the intention that it would be selling after five years and we would be talking about it,” says Chetan. Talking about his latest release, the author exclaimed, “This time I did a story on three boys from Gujarat who have a small shop. I think I’ve got more than I deserve and just to deserve that I keep trying to do better.” (Now that’s truly a modest answer from a writer, isn’t it?) Like the protagonist of 3 Mistakes of My Life, there were some mistakes Chetan, the writer has also made. And that’s when we found him jocularly quipping, “ I didn’t take enough humanties subjects in school. Now I am a writer. I’m reading stuff on psychology because now I need to. That was one mistake.” “The second is that I can’t give my family enough time. I want to be near my kids. And the third is that I’ve let myself gain weight. Look at that picture man ." (pointing to his picture on the cover of his book). Similar to his earlier 2 novels, Chetan Bhagat’s newly released, 3 Mistakes of My Life also centres around the youth. The setting is in Ahmedabad and the story revolves around Godhra riots and the Gujarat earthquake. Perhaps that’s the reason Chetan Bhagat vociferously claimed: “Seventy five year olds are running a country which is twenty five years old. These issues keep me awake at night. People commute four hours to do an internship. That is not the way to run a country.” “There was no internet ten years ago. The world has changed so much. There was no competition to the level that there is today,” said Chetan trying to explain why he always chooses to write on BPOS, IIT campus and now life in Ahmedabad. The story of ONACC has been adapted by filmmaker Atul Agnihotri and he is believed to be soon coming out with the film rendition of the novel titled Hello. It wasn’t easy for Chetan to accept Atul’s offer. “Doing the script was more difficult than I had thought. Initially, I didn’t want the book to be adapted. I said I want to move to my next story. Then Atul took the rights. I said make sure you adapt it well, he said well there’s no one here to adapt it well so if you want it to be adapted well then you’ll have to adapt it,” and that’s how the project was frozen. Will we ever see Chetan Bhagat directing a film? “I’ve thought about it. It’s quite a crazy job. I don’t think I have the required skill sets. People who I respect in Bollywood have told me to wait.” As for his future plans, the writer is working on another script. He wants to do something light ‘like a romantic comedy perhaps’. “I have the story in mind,” says the novelist. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | Next>> Back to News | Books Home | Movies | Music | Search | Feedback