India, May 24 -- Dear Reader,

A few days ago, I received a text message from my student Anisa.

"It's great that Heart Lamp has won a big literary prize. But now I have a problem. It's one more book everybody is talking about, one more book I feel compelled to read. Every month there seems to be a new literary prize in the news - the Booker prize, the International Booker, the Pulitzer, the Woman's prize, the Nobel Prize. Then there's the JCB prize, the Crossword prize - the list of prizes is as long as Hanuman's tail!

Honestly, I am confused. There is all this talk of how we shouldn't just be swayed by prizes. And then when a book wins a prize, everyone lines up to read it.

A few years ago, I picked up a book that had won this same pr...