Cross-Purposes
Here’s another reason why the Crossword literary awards can never be the Indian Booker: they drag their prize ceremony on till late at night, ignoring the crucial factor of news deadlines for print and TV channels. Unlike the Booker ceremony that’s orchestrated to coincide with prime time TV news in the UK. To start a literary prize function at 7 pm, then waste the next three hours with speeches and tabla recitals by unknown child prodigies before announcing the prize is asking to be ignored by the media. Which is what happened last Friday night when the Crossword awards were announced in Mumbai—too late for the day’s news and too dead for next day’s papers. Luckily for them, some prizewinners were more media savvy—tweeting the results to those who cared enough to wait up for them.