These are the best of times. We toast this year’s Booker king of cool. Oh, all right, it’s the worst of times. Now is the winter of discontent for The-Other-Writers. Who wants to be Aravind Adiga? (Who wants to be a millionaire?) We all do. And if we’re honest, raising our glasses to the winner we see the pages of our own manuscripts rise on a cool wind, flutter through an open window into nothingness and we ask this question of ourselves, “Why couldn’t it be me?” Jealousy is not just a green-eyed monster, it’s a white tiger.

Overnight, Adiga went seamlessly global. Brand Adiga is now like Kellogg’s cornflakes.
He deserves his success. As for The-Other- Writers, we spot the simplicity of his achievement and mutter ,”Why didn’t I think of it ?” You see, The-Other-Writers, dream of virginal hunting grounds where we stumble upon the perfect plot, pluck from a hidden tree a ripe, juicy apple. No-one else must know it is there. That is the plan. But … Adiga got there first.

It was there, waiting to be written. Someone had to chronicle that India of Light and India of Darkness, but it wasn’t me or any of the other “Indian” writers abroad. All those annual family holidays NRI-style (good shopping, best spicy Punjabi-Chinese food, daarling). We have seen the many Mr Ashoks and Pinky Madams and
ignored the dull-eyed urchins tugging at our sleeves. Yet Adiga’s narrative was the alarm button because we, The- Other-Writers, set it on Snooze.

And now I hear Adiga has almost finished his second novel. Cagey about it too. Prolific output that is not one’s own is just too much to bear. Just thinking about all this is very dispiriting, I think I’ll postpone writing my next chapter until tomorrow. As the British so sportingly say, “Never mind, there’s always next year!”
Saumya Balsari has written the novel The Cambridge Curry Club