Amitav Ghosh And Chetan Bhagat Compete For A Literary Prize
Chetan Bhagat.
Amitav Ghosh, who has conjured up numerous worlds in his novels, would probably never have imagined this day. The writer of such edifying books as The Shadow Lines and Sea of Poppies is competing with Chetan Bhagat, the hero of mass market fiction, for a literary prize. Ghosh’s River of Smoke and Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 have been shortlisted in the “popular” category of the Economist Crossword Book Awards for 2011. That’s not all. Ghosh is also pitted against Rujuta Diwekar, the woman behind Kareena Kapoor’s lithe body and author of Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha; Suhel Seth, who offers tips on how to be a good social climber in Get to the Top; and Ravinder Singh, the author of Can Love Happen Twice?
At the Crossword awards, books are nominated in the “popular” category based on the amount they have sold in rupee terms. The nominees are determined by calculating the average of the sales of a book for the entire year and its sales during the first three months of publication. The 2011 shortlist might have caused Ghosh spill his coffee on one of his hide-bound Egyptian notebooks. While a hardback copy of River of Smoke costs Rs699, Revolution 2020 costs just Rs140. Which means Bhagat probably vastly outsold Ghosh. See here for the list of all the nominees for the 2011 Economist Crossword Book Awards.
Tags: Amitav Ghosh, Books, Chetan Bhagat, Crossword, Crossword Book Awards, Ravinder Singh, Revolution 2020, River of Smoke, Rujuta Diwekar, Suhel Seth, The Economist Crossword Book AwardComments (3)
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We know it’s the DEATH of literature when people put the amazing Amitav Ghosh in the same category as Chetan Bhagat, Suhel Seth, and the others.
Can someone from the heralded committee explain what a distinguished writer is doing among a sea of non-writers!!!! Wait, don’t even bother.
Atleast they’re being upfront about the fact that is purely driven by how commercially successful a book was, and isn’t based on quality or critical acclaim.
Suhel Seth should hang his head in shame after putting his name to that travesty of a book. And Chetan Bhagat has probably taken valuable lessons from that same book on tenacious social climbing. One must never argue with success but one can certainly lament the fact that our book awards have become as much as a joke as some of these nominees.
A dark, dark day for Indian publishing.