| When It's Bad, It's Good |
8 December 2003
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Bad Sex in Fiction Award Goes to India's Aniruddha Bahal
As if there weren't enough glory and money in writing (Director's Note: deliver with sarcasm), the good people at the Literary Review in London have handed out another award for Bad Sex in Fiction. This year's prize goes to Indian journalist and novelist Aniruddha Bahal for his particularly bad passage in his work Bunker 13. He also wins the Kensington Review Good Grace Award.
The effort is not the work of an amateur, no. The professional credentials of Mr. Bahal are quite impressive. He has covered cricket in India for many years, uncovering a match-fixing incident, and he actually caught some defense officials in the Indian government on film taking bribes. Yet, he managed to put these words in this order:
"She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time.... She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. "
Decidedly bad. And Mr. Bahal was a little annoyed at winning, claiming that lots of his peers in India thought the sex writing was great and that he wouldn't change a word. He now joins the likes of Melvyn Bragg, A.A. Gill, and Salman Rushdie as winners of this trophy.
Yet he wins the Good Grace Award for turning up to accept his prize from musician Sting (the tantric sex maven) at a ceremony last week in London. His publishers flew him from India where he is based, and he had a chance to see his friends there. And given the amount of prudery in Indian publishing and society, he gladly accepted the award as an act of rebellion. Best of all, he told the BBC, "I'm not one to shy away from having a laugh at my own expense." The Kensington Review is not laughing at Mr. Bahal but with him.
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