The best thing about having an Asian litfest is that you can include almost anybody. V.S. Naipaul was a star invitee, but didn’t make it for the usual reason—too busy writing. But Yann Martel, the Canadian Booker prize-winner was there for the eight-day fest. His claim to Asian roots, of course, lies in Life of Pi’s beginnings in Pondicherry. Pondicherry, incidentally, is turning Martel’s fiction into truth by building a new zoo to commemorate his book.
Many Indian writers, especially of pre-book agent vintage, are discovering that the UK owes them money, sometimes thousands of pounds. This, thanks to the Public Lending Right Law passed recently in the UK, which stipulates that each time a subscriber borrows a book from a public library, a few pennies are credited to its author as his intellectual property right. But with some authors dead, and others residing in distant parts of India, the money is lying unclaimed, according to Reginald Massey, author and an ex-journo active in writers’ guilds. Topping the list, says he, is late President S. Radhakrishnan, followed by R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond.
