One has to hand it to Vikas Swarup Ð itxs an original theme, and deftly handled. Q and A is a page-turner, a soap opera, a thriller and a love story packed into one. What it is not, is literary

As publishers, both at home and across the seas, open their doors to manuscripts penned in English by writers of Indian origin – and not just literary tomes – we may well throw up our very own P.G. Wodehouse, observes Renuka Chatterjee

IWE-watchers may have noticed that there’s a phrase one doesn’t hear much any more, and that is ‘the St. Stephen’s School of Writing.’ (After The God of Small Things, not to know what IWE stands for is sheer blasphemy.) Time was when SSSW was the phrase that tripped most lightly off the pens of critics and columnists and almost anyone who chose to comment on the literary scene.

Then along came Ms Roy, thank god for her, to break the mould not only by being female, but by passing St Stephen’s over for the Delhi School of Architecture. And now, unnoticed and unsung yet by the critics and pen-pushers, we seem to have a new school of writing creeping up on us – that could justifiably be called the MEA School of Writing. I mean, just look at the facts. In a span of about two years, we’ve had Navtej Sarna, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, with his debut novel, We Weren’t Lovers Like That, Nirupama Rao, his predecessor at the same ministry, with a book of poems, G. Parthasarthy with his novel. Pavan Varma, of course, has the distinction of spanning both schools, having occupied the South Africa or some such desk at the MEA before taking off for London as director of the Nehru Centre (which begs the question: do his last two books, The Great Indian Middle Class and Being Indian: Why the 21st Century Will Be India’s, come under the MEA or the SSSW?)

Presiding benignly over them all is the Minister of External Affairs himself, K. Natwar Singh, a veteran of no less than nine books. Singh has now been overshadowed, to put it mildly, by a subordinate in his ministry, Vikas Swarup. Swarup is without question the newest and biggest star to join the galaxy of the IWE. His novel, Q and A, has been snapped up by UK publishers, Doubleday-Transworld, for a six-figure advance, sold in several languages across the world, optioned for film rights, and set cash registers ringing madly on both sides of the hemisphere. The spiel is the same, but the story is different. In more ways than one.