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Using soft power

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Vikas Swarup leads something of a double life. An Indian diplomat by day, currently posted to Osaka, Japan, as India's consul general, he is also the acclaimed author of two best-selling novels. He was in Hong Kong on January 13-15, wearing his author's hat at two events organised in his honour by the Hong Kong Literary Festival.

His debut novel was the 2005 novel Q&A, which shot him to fame when it was turned into the blockbuster film Slumdog Millionaire. The story centres on the adventures of a homeless orphan, Ram Mohammed Thomas, whose courage and zest for life help him rise from the gutters of Indian society to become a rupee billionaire thanks to an unlikely win on a television quiz show.

Swarup completed the novel in just two months.

'I think in general I'm a fast-ish person, so to speak,' he says. 'Even in my office work, I try to finish it off as soon as I can.'

He puts his breakneck output - he wrote 20,000 words of Q&A in a single weekend - down to the relative abandon enjoyed by debut novelists.

'I think the advantage of a first-time writer is that you write unselfconsciously. You do not pore over what you have written again and again, thinking: 'Is this right?' 'How will this be perceived?' 'How will this be received?' et cetera.'

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