Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won Booker

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children looks set to win the Best of Booker prize in the ultimate accolade for an author whose post-colonial prose on independent India has transfixed a generation, enabled the empire to write a back and won a slew of awards.

The Best of Booker award, to be presented at the London literary festival in July, will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize. It will be the first time a winner has been chosen from a shortlist by public vote.

In Rushdie, who is up against five other shortlist authors ranging from the towering J.M Coetzee to Nadine Gordimer, who were to win, it would make Midnight’s Children the greatest Booker-Prize-winning novel of all time. It would be the third time Rushdie has been honored by the Booker for the same novel, having won the actual prize in 1981 and receiving the Booker of Bookers in 1993, when the Prize marked its 25th anniversary.
Interestingly, VS Naipaul has been left off the shortlist despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

It is seen to be measure of Rushdie’s triumph that he heads a heavyweight shortlist that notably fails to feature of some 20th century’s foremost writers, including Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and William Golding. The shortlist is seen to have a distinctly post-colonial tinge with five linked to Empire, not least JG Farell’s 1973 novel The Siege of Krishnapur, which is set in 1850s India.

The shortlist also includes Gordimer’s The Conservationist, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road and Coetzee’s Disgrace.

But it is Rushdie’s inclusion on the shortlist that has excited the most interest with the reliable indicator of Public mood - the British bookmaker – installing him as the favorite, with Barker, Carey, Coetzee, Gordmer and Farell following in that order with ever-longer odds. The judges who drew up the shortlist from some of the most revered Booker-winning novels of the last 40 years, said Rushdie was a natural for this ultimate honor because he won the original prize “for what his fans or detractors would think of as his best book…it has an ebullience and a brilliance.”

But the shortlist has not been universally well received with some critics complaining that it is heavy with novels that are now literary history and fails to include recent popular winning titles such as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

British Airways takes beef off it’s menu

British Airways has taken off its menu for economy class passengers on most international flights in a bid a avoid offending Hindus.

The carrier, whose second biggest long-haul market is to India, has instead switched to a fish pie or chicken portion, citing “religious restriction”. British newspaper the Daily Mail reported.

We can only serve two options and beef and pork obviously have religious restrictions. We have to try to use two meals which appeal to as many customers as possible.

This summer season we are offering customers in World Travelers on most long haul flights a choice of chicken and fish pie. We also look at trends from major super markets to see what types of meals are popular and fish pie style meals are selling well at the moment. These two meals proved popular in tasting test and are also proving popular on board,” a spokesperson for British Airways was quoted as saying.

The Hindu Council in the United Kingdom welcomed the decision. A spokesperson said “The Hindu Community will welcome this decision and the news it has been made partly because Hindus don’t eat beef.

Hindus are tolerant of the beliefs of others and do not expect everyone to stop eating a food because they do not eat it.”

World’s Top Thinkers

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself, said French-Algerian writer philosopher Albert Camus, turns out that someone is keeping track of intellectuals, too.

The latest issue of the influential Foreign Policy magazine has identified the worlds Top 100 “public intellectuals “, in its second such exercise, awarding America – and the United States – with more cerebral heft than any other continent or country. India comes out shining too.

Besides familiar names such as Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Umberto Eco, Lee Kaun Yew, the list has some half dozen Indians: historian Ramachandra Guha, political psychologist Ashis Nandy and environmentalist Sunita Narain, all of whom lives in India.among them.

Four other Indians based outside India also make the list: economist Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, journalist author Fareed Zakaria, novelist Salman Rushdie and San Diego based neuroscientist V.S Ramchandran. Pakistan and Bangladesh have one name each in top 100 – lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan and microfinance guru Mohammad Yunus, while China has four.

Unmindful of the remark by former US vice-president Sprio Agnew, that an intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike. FP has parked for more than a third (36) of the world’s top eggheads in the United States.

Foreign Policy also credits Europe which has deep tradition of intellectualism, with 30 names in the top 100 – less than North America – including Briton Niall Ferguson, Ian Buruma and Christopher Hitchens. West Asia accounts for 11, and Asia 12 which means India accounts for half of Asia’s eggheads.

The list includes 17 political scientists, 15 economists, 12 each of philosophers, scientists, 8 artists and novelists, 6 each of historians, activists and leaders, 4 religious heads, and 2 environmentalists.

In defining the criteria for its selection, FP said the candidates among the world most sophisticated thinkers..have shown distinction in their particular fields as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.