Bibliofile
Who would be the first III (IWE Indian Idol)? Hutch Crossword Book Award (the desi Booker) this year has separate short-lists for fiction and non-fiction plus a Popular Award for which readers can vote via SMS.
The usual suspects dominate the fiction shortlist, however. There's Naipaul's worst novel, Magic Seeds, competing with Rushdie's latest, Shalimar the Clown. Others: Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta, Surface by Siddhartha Deb, The Tiger Claw by Shauna Singh Baldwin and The Radiance of Ashes by Cyrus Mistry. Few surprises in the translations as well: Krishna Sobti's The Heart Has Its Reasons, Gurdial Singh's The Survivors, Mahasweta Devi's After Kurukshetra, Manzoor Ahtesham's A Dying Banyan, Bama's Sangati: Events and V.K. Madhavan Kutty's The Unspoken Curse. The surprise this year is a Popular Award (Rs 1 lakh), for which readers can vote via SMS from the 18 shortlisted titles. Since none of the shortlisted authors have either the drawing power or the ambition of an Indian Idol, wonder how this will work.
There won't be any star tantrums at the second Neemrana litfest next week. Reason? No stars are expected to be there. V.S. Naipaul was excluded, quite understandably. But even the other two stars who were invited—Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy—sent in their regrets. Which leaves the vacated IWE floor to Namita Gokhale, Pavan Varma and Ashis Nandy.