BEAUTY QUEENS

I think my life is now to be split into two chapters: before last Sunday and after. As I slept in a London hotel last Sunday night, Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire – based on my book Q & A – won four Golden Globe awards. I had gone to bed early and when I turned on the television on Monday morning, the lead story was that the film had swept the board. I felt elated.

Who could have imagined that would happen to a book I wrote in London in just two months in 2003? I’d never visualised it as a film; I couldn’t even visualise it as a book. I was a first-time author – my day job is as an Indian diplomat – and wasn’t even sure I had a chance of getting it published. Now my inbox is full of interview requests and messages of congratulation. The phone has been ringing off the hook and the requests are pretty varied – I’ve just been invited to attend the Miss India Worldwide beauty pageant.

STREET KNOWLEDGE

Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a chai wallah (tea boy) from the slums of Mumbai who becomes a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. He is accused of cheating because people can’t believe a boy without education could know so many of the answers, but knowledge picked up on the street is often as important as formal education in a school.

I was inspired to write the story when I read a news report about the “hole in the wall” project. A group of scientists had installed a computer with an internet connection in a wall in an Indian slum. When they returned after a few months, they found that the children living there had started using it. These were children who couldn’t read and couldn’t speak English but they were logging on to the worldwide web. It made me think that there must be an innate ability in all of us that can come to the surface.

The second inspiration was the huge success of the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Then, when Major Charles Ingram was accused of cheating on the British version, I had my story.

I love my job as a diplomat. I’m currently the Indian deputy high commissioner to South Africa. India is the flavour of the season. Despite the horror of the recent attacks, there’s a sense of opportunity there. Everyone is trying to move up in life.

You’ll find that a poor cobbler earning £1 a day will be saving up to send his children to a good school. He knows that he is a cobbler because he didn’t get an education, but if his children can then maybe they can get the right breaks in life.

SNAIL AND SEA BASS

London was a mad whirl of book signings and interviews —– I think I did about 20 interviews in one stretch just for the BBC. I stayed at the Grosvenor Victoria hotel, and went for a nice lunch with my London publishers at a gastro pub in Ealing. I had snail and sea bass.

I also saw my agent, Peter Buckman. I was Peter’s first client. Had it not been for him, who knows? History may have been different.

CLASSROOM HERO

I arrived back in Johannesburg on Thursday morning. I was collected by a car from the high commission and had two hours’ rest at home before heading to the office. My children’s school bus picks them up at 6.30am so they’d already gone by the time I got home.

My eldest son, who is 16, has told me that everyone at school wants to read my book – I think the attention has made him pretty popular. My younger son, who is 12, is showing an entrepreneurial streak. He read my new book Six Suspects and then demanded an MP3 player as a reward, hinting that he might reveal the name of the murderer on Facebook if I did not comply.

Both of them have good ideas but it’s a chore to get them to write more than two or three pages. In today’s world, the image has drowned out the word to such an extent that children can’t concentrate. Television addiction is something that needs to be addressed. My wife tries to limit the amount of TV our sons watch, but not with much success.

NOW FOR THE OSCARS

Yesterday I was off again — this time to India. I’m making an appearance at the Jaipur literary festival and seeing friends and family. The most important engagement is the premiere of Slumdog on Thursday, which I’m going to attend in Mumbai. The city has recovered from the terrorist attack, but the scars remain.

I value my anonymity. That’s the best thing about being an author – people can send you flattering e-mails but you can pass them by on the street without them recognising you. I shudder to think what will happen if the movie wins an Oscar.

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