From underdog to slumdog millionaire

Everybody loves a story about an underdog who triumphs over impossible odds. But even by the rah-rah standards of the victorious underdog tale, the journey of the novel Q&A from a weekend project of an Indian diplomat who had never written fiction before to the Academy Award-winning worldwide hit Slumdog Millionaire is a little extreme. 

“It’s a fairy tale,” says Q&A author Vikas Swarup, who had a book signing as well as a Q&A with readers on Nov. 17 at National Book Store in Glorietta 5, Ayala Center. “I really got lucky. And you can only get lucky once.”

Consider how Q&A was written. “The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer,” begins Swarup, who has spent most of his professional life in the foreign service. “I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard. I was quite happy with my day job. Before London where I wrote Q&A I was posted in Addis Ababa. It was such a sleepy little place— In three years there was not a single delegation from India. If I’d wanted to write I could’ve written 20 novels there. But I never felt like that, I didn’t think that I had a novel in me. 

“It was only in London that the writing bug bit me. Mainly it was the personality of the city itself, it’s the hub of the English-speaking world, of the English publishing world. Just being in that environment sort of motivated me.”

The second thing: “I discovered that many of my contemporaries in the foreign service were trying their hand at fiction. I said, ‘I never imagined this guy to be a writer, but he’s writing, so can I also write? Do I have a novel in me?’ So it really started as a challenge against myself.”

Having accepted the challenge, the first task was to decide what he would write about. “I was quite clear that I was not going to write the usual generational family saga, some 1830-1970 kind of thing,” he laughs. “Magical realism also did not attract me as much, writing about an unreal world with talking monkeys. Then it struck me: Why not write about a globally-syndicated televized quiz show?”

The worldwide hit Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? changed the rules of the game completely, Swarup notes. “When I was in college I used to participate in a lot of quizzes. ‘What was the original name of New Zealand,’ those kinds of things. I related my experience as a quizzer to what was happening on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and I discovered one fundamental difference. 

“In my time when they asked you a question, you gave an answer. If you did not know the answer, you guessed the answer. Now, if you are 99.9 percent sure of the answer but not 100 percent, and you are sitting on, say, P100,000, you say, ‘I’ll take my money and I will go.’

“I thought, they’ve commercialized even that interaction between yourself and your brain! Your instinctive reactions have also been colored by the color of money. It would be an interesting idea to write about a quiz show with a contestant who has not joined for money. Who has not even gone to school. This would be an antidote to this kind of rampant commercialization. That’s when the idea for Q&A germinated.”

The main task, he recalls, was fleshing out the personality of his contestant-hero and planning out the questions he would be asked. Instead of a detailed outline he had three or four pages of notes — the name of the character, when he was born, a timeline. “Believe it or not, I wrote Q&A in two months.” 

Two months, with the actual writing done on weekends only.

“I did not take a day’s leave from work. I would come home between 5:30 and 6 in the evening and do three hours of research because I was writing about stuff that I had no knowledge about personally. I was writing about betting in cricket matches, prostitution, the quiz show itself. While living in Golders Green in London, right opposite to the synagogue. So I researched on weekdays and wrote on weekends. One weekend I even wrote 20,000 words.”

As if that were not enough to set a part-time writer’s teeth on edge, consider this: the published novel is Swarup’s first draft. “Not a single paragraph has been rewritten,” he  points out happily, as if he still can’t believe it himself. “It has been edited but not rewritten, which for a first-time writer is almost unthinkable.”

The writing of his second novel, Six Suspects, followed a more conventional arc. “The Six Suspects took me more than one and a half years. When the first novel is a great success, there’s more pressure on you. The publishers suggest that you write another novel with the same characters. I rejected that. I said, ‘Look, the first novel became a hit and people enjoyed it because it was something new. If I do that again it means that’s the only story I have to tell.’ As it turned out I had six stories to tell. So I wrote Six Suspects.” 

When the novel Q&A was first published, it was not viewed as a critique of India. “It was seen as a coming of age story, with a protagonist who battles insurmountable odds to emerge as a winner. It’s a story of hope and the triumph of the underdog. It was only when the movie came out that all these criticisms started. One, the movie was called Slumdog Millionaire, two, a movie is much more in-your-face.

“If you’ve read my novel,” the author continues, “The arc of Q&A goes way beyond the slums. In fact the slums of Mumbai are only in the last six months of the hero’s life to that point. The movie Slumdog Millionaire caught a lot of flak: many people pounced on it as portraying a very negative image of India.” The moment the movie won all those Oscars, he adds, the criticism disappeared.

“Who had given this movie a hope in hell?” he says. “Made on a $15 million budget with unknown actors, with a musician that the rest of the world had not heard of, directed by Danny Boyle who had never won an Oscar in his life or even been nominated.”

Swarup attributes the massive success of Slumdog Millionaire  to three factors present at the time of the movie’s release.

“The most important thing was the global economic crisis. People were losing their jobs, it was a time of great uncertainty and people wanted something that would give them hope. The second thing was, at a time when almost every Hollywood blockbuster had computer-generated images, people felt that Slumdog was real. The third thing: this was about India.

“This is the time of India,” declares this career diplomat.  “Another great movie about the slums of India came out in 1988, it was called Salaam, Bombay. That also won awards, but did not get the kind of attention Slumdog Millionaire gained — because 1988 was not the time of India. The world’s attention was not focused on India to the extent that it is focused now.”

At the first whiff of a publishing deal many writers quit their day jobs and take up the pen full-time. A bestselling novel and a blockbuster film adaptation have not convinced Swarup to do that. “My publishers keep dropping hints that I should quit my day job and become a full-time writer. I’ve said no, and I have a couple of reasons. I’ve written only two books, not 20 — what’s the guarantee that the third book will also be a bestseller? 

“And then, being a diplomat allows you to meet a wide group of people every day. I’ll tell you a secret. I used to work for the foreign minister of India in 2004. When he resigned I took about three months off. I thought, ‘This job is 24/7, seven days a week, so I would rather now take some time off.’ They gave me three months leave and at that time I started working on my second novel. So I was living the life of a full-time writer. I did not have an office to attend, did not have a mobile phone on me 24 hours a day there was no pressure on me.

“At the end of those three months I wrote 55,000 words, but I found the experience was not all that great. Number one, I felt under pressure all the time. Even when I was watching a movie or taking a walk in the park: ‘What are you doing? You’re a writer, you should be writing, what the hell are you doing, you’re wasting your time.’ 

“Writing is a very lonely occupation,” he reminds us. “To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions, you want your stream of thought uninterrupted. And I found that a day job gave me the opportunity of meeting people and having real conversations. The writer’s is an interior world, a world of the mind. I found that many times, even though my day job is very different from what a writer does, the spark of fiction comes from the real world. So no, I would rather be a diplomat and write on weekends.”

Vikas Swarup, part-time writer, offers this advice to his fellow part-timers: “Write if you have that fire in the blood. But then get it critiqued. You see, many people think they are the next Nobel prize-winning novelist, but objectively their novel is not that good. You have to get it critiqued, but not by your friends because they will give you biased advice. Get it critiqued by people who can objectively tell you how good or bad it is.

“Luck is a very important factor,” he emphasizes. “They are writers a million times better than me who have never been published. Why? Because they did not get the break that I got.

“I did not go to any creative writing workshop, I did not major in literature,” Vikas Swarup declares. “If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination.”