‘I want to be sold at traffic lights in India,’ says Archer

Jeffrey Archer is in India on a eleven day six-city trip to promote his latest (14th) novel A Prisoner Of Birth, which he says is modern day version of The Count of Monte Cristo. (Click on the picture for the Video)

Undoubtedly Indian crowd has charmed him just the way he has charmed the Indian crowd. Many of us have grown up reading his novels. His fans in India affectionately call him Sachin Tendulkar of Books. Sachin Tendulkar he is indeed, after giving so many best selling and popular hits.

What does Archer wish from India? Well, he wants to be sold at traffic signals across India. “That’s where, I am told, the top selling authors are sold,” he says jokingly.

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The Shape Of The Beast

Eleven years after she won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, 14 conversations (2001-2008 ) with Roy on her social and political activism appear in a new book The Shape of the Beast.

Even before The God of Small Things hit the world of fame, this female Rushdie of India attracted lot of media attention when she criticised Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi, charging Kapur with exploiting Devi and misrepresenting both her life and its meaning. For sometime Roy was involved as film script writer as well. She even tried her hands at acting in films. Not many remember but Arundhati Roy played a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib.

(Click on the Image for a Video of an Interview with Arundhati Roy on The Shape of the Beast).

The Shape of the Beast finds Roy fulminating against the 2002 Godhra genocide, empathising with the adivasis of Dantewada in Chhattisgarh and venting against the military operations in Nagaland, Kashmir and Manipur.Through this book Roy has revealed both a personal and social journey.

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Best of Booker

Salman Rushdie and Arunadhati Roy are competing with Yann Martel for The Best of the Booker. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is neck to neck in the race with The Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Rushdie won in 1981 and Martel in 2002. The Life of Pi is a fable of survival after a shipwreck (2002) while Midnight’s Children challenges ideas of history and nationhood (1981).

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