Indians dominate DSC Prize Longlist

Works of 13 Indian authors, including a writer duo, figure in the longlist of 16 titles for the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature announced today.

Manhad Narula, Ira Pande and Surina Narula at the
announcement of the DSC Prize

The longlist for the USD 50,000 award was chosen from 52 entries which were reviewed by a five-member jury comprising chairperson Ira Pande, Alastair Niven (UK), Fakrul Alam (Bangladesh), Faiza S Khan (Pakistan) and Marie Brenner (US).

The longlisted books include an interesting mix of established as well debut novelists, along with three translated entries, the jury said.

Among the prominent Indian authors longlisted for their works are Manu Joseph (Serious Men), Usha K R (Monkey-man), Tabish Khair (The Thing About Thugs) and Kishwar Desai (Witness the Night).

Commenting on the longlist, Pande said, "This list is an interesting mix of 16 titles chosen after a careful consideration of various styles, languages and subject matter. It reflects the best of the South Asian literary tradition - a wide landscape of rural and urban life, intricate rituals of story-telling and an indication of its evolving form.

"This is the East, seen as it is by some of the most promising novelists of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, and as it appears to those who live elsewhere."

Full report here Outlook

Home turf

Writer Siddharth Chowdhury on his latest book and why he continues to mine the cities, Patna and Delhi, in his works

For any writer to admit that his ambition in life is to “avoid writing a lot” would be blasphemous, but Siddharth Chowdhury, author of the recently-released Day Scholar (Picador, Rs 250) merely shrugs when you point this out to him. “I barely do any research, I work mostly from memory. I visually map the book, think about the characters, and when I write, I usually do that on weekends. Sometimes, after thinking out the characters, I sit down after six months. My books are done over a period of four years. Not writing a lot is quite easily achieved,” says Chowdhury.

His latest book too draws from Chowdhury’s familiar milieu — Delhi University; his Bihari protagonist from Patna is placed in Hakikat Nagar, the writer’s former residence during his salad days. But unlike his debut novel Patna Roughcut, that hailed him as the newest kid on the contemporary literature scene, Day Scholar has earned mixed responses. “There are people who don’t like my book at all and there are those who love it. Patna Roughcut also got good reviews only in the last year,” says the 35-year-old.

Full report here Indian Express

A story long awaited

Days at college are special. They are the in-between years of what you are and what you will be. And for a budding writer at Delhi University, these in-between years were spent observing and imagining situations, environs and characters that is Day Scholar. In protagonist Hriday Thakur’s own words, “I was training myself to observe better, to notice things only a writer would... I was training myself to look at everyone as a potential character…” And in a story that winds up in 160-odd pages, Siddharth Chowdhury’s effort to do just that is quite evident. For Chowdhury, who himself read English Literature at Delhi University, it would have been obvious to write about his days at the university and the slew of colourful and interesting characters, as well as situations that anybody who has spent time at DU, studying or otherwise, could easily relate to.

This is the story of Hriday Thakur, who comes from an upper middle class family in Kadam Kuan, Patna. His ambition to become a writer brings him to DU, where he goes through a roller-coaster ride in his first year of college, learning and unlearning more than he could ever apprehend. But more than the classrooms and the college campuses, the book dwells in the surroundings that form the fringes of DU’s North Campus and an ecosystem in itself. Shakti Nagar, Kamla Nagar, Maurice Nagar, Batra Cinema, Majnu ka Tila and other locations are the many cradles of the story. Then are those interesting, yet ever so familiar characters that one might have bumped into during one’s college days. Zorawar Singh Shokeen, the half jat-half Gujjar owner of Shokeen Niwas, Hriday and his Kadam Kuan friend and accomplice Pranjal’s crib in Delhi. Shokeen is a political broker and a shady property dealer. Then the scrawny Jishnu Sharma, Shokeen’s Man Friday, who arrives in Delhi to prepare for civils like scores of students from Bihar but never goes on to do anything about them. And a host of other stereotypical DU characters that keep the story readable and enjoyable, injecting life and nostalgia into the narrative.

'I write in a panic'

Sitting across the table with Siddharth Chowdhury, you would think he's an editor at an academic publishing house (which he is) with an interest in languid poetry (which he doesn't) and has never opened a 'gentleman's 
magazine' (his early stories came out in the venerable Debonair).

"Well, that was a bit awkward, I guess, showing it at home," says Chowdhury. "Nothing drastic, just awkward," says the 36-year-old author of Day Scholar, a stunning book set in early 90s Delhi that seamlessly juxtaposes the poetry of everyday violence with that of bright-eyed tenderness that only the young wear. And all this, Chowdhury laces with a dark comic fluid that the reader ends up laughing at even though he knows it's not funny.

"I'm very autobiographical," he says not at all sounding like a walking-talking tautology. "This is the time and place I know well. I've been there myself, 1992 Zakir Husain College, living in a hostel with friends."

Full report here Hindustan Times 

Rangbazi in North Campus

A Patna boy comes to Delhi and finds a voice. Nothing new except the funny, sly narrative that brings him alive

Day Scholar;
Siddharth Chowdhury;
Pan Macmillan;
Rs 250; Pp 164

The unpretentious, honest and lucid writing of Patna Roughcut, Siddharth Chowdhury’s debut novel, left the reader wanting more. Here was a new voice rooted in a place one doesn’t come across often in English fiction. The slim coming-of-age tale featured Ritwik Ray who, having come back to his hometown Patna as a newspaper man, looks back on his adolescent and teen years— and the oddball cast of characters that populated it—with feeling and wry humour.

Day Scholar, Chowdhury’s equally slim and readable second novel, feels like a continuation of his earlier work. Like Ray, the protagonist and narrator Hriday Thakur is a Bengali boy who grew up in Patna. While Ray mostly talked about his life up until he turned 17 and left for Delhi, Hriday in Day Scholar picks up the thread as a 17-year-old, first-year student in Delhi University (DU).

The son of an English professor, Hriday likes cricket, doesn’t care about studies and is quite friendly with fixers and crooks who carry kattas (country pistols) and ustaras (barber’s razor) and are known as rangbaz. Knowing such characters had its advantages in Bihar in the early 1990s. Sudama Pathak is one such rangbaz. “…(H)e was a shy unassuming boy whom his friends called ‘tikki’ on account of the long rat-tail that he sported, but in the intervening two years he had blossomed into a tough little bastard,” Hriday informs us.

Full review here Mint