Booker winner Adiga almost ready with second novel

LONDON: Enjoying the spotlight after winning the 2008 Man Booker prize for his debut novel, young Indian novelist Arvind Adiga says his second novel is "almost done" but declined to give details about the upcoming book.     

The 33-year-old journalist based in Mumbai also rejected suggestions that his award-winning book "The White Tiger" was overly critical of Indian society saying that he had intended to be provocative but "funny' at the same time to engage the reader.
     
"I like books that have ideas in them and that move and that entertain," Oxfored-educated Adiga said shortly after bagging the prestigious literary prize for his book which was described as a "perfect novel" by the chairman of the judges and former politician Michael Portillo.
     
Announcing the winner at a ceremony in London, Portillo said "My criteria were 'Does it knock my socks off?' and this one did...the others impressed me...this one knocked my socks off."
     
Asked by BBC Radio about writing his next book, Adiga said he didn't "have to sit down to write it, it's almost done." He declined to give details on the subject he would be writing on.
     
The youngest author on the Booker shortlist said he wrote "the kind of book I'd like to read."
      
"Making it to the shortlist on a first novel is sort of like winning and anything beyond that is quite a bonus," Adiga said. The novel is about a tale of a man's journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success.

Adiga said his book was fiction, "built on a substratum of Indian reality. Here's one example: Balram's father, in the novel, dies of tuberculosis.
      
Now, this is a make-believe figure, but underlying it is a piece of  appalling reality - the fact that nearly a thousand Indians, most of them poor, die every day of tuberculosis," said the fromer Time correspondent.
    
The writing of the novel, said Adiga, had come out  of his career as a journalist, and his encounters -- as a relatively privileged  middle-class man - with members of India's underclass.
    
"Class is a boring topic to write about.  Big divides are not what people are interested in. But it's the most pressing concern - because other  things spring out of it, like terrorism and instability," he said.
    
"The book has done very well in India - and there  is a need for books like this," he said, adding "something extraordinary is happening between the rich and the poor. Once, there was at least a common culture between rich and poor, but that has been eroded, and people have noted that."
    
Asked what he would do with the money, Adiga said: "The first thing is  to find a bank I can put it in."
    
Adiga cites Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin as influences; both authors who depicted worlds that their audiences hardly  knew.