The undeservedly pampered, utterly arrogant, unashamedly talentless and banally ignorant breed of “writers” who’ve emerged as a sort of phenomenon in recent times. I put “writers” in quotes because writing is not defined merely as someone adept at using language. If that’s the case, every blogger writing about how “I woke up and spent almost an hour trying to decide what to wear to work today” qualifies as a writer. Come to think of it: these guys are only slightly better than such bloggers but the damage they’ve inflicted is immense. Irrefutable Proof: Aravind Adiga, the latest prize-winning ignoramus extraordinaire. Majority of these Indians writing in English can’t speak—let alone read or write—a sentence of even their mother tongue without introducing an English word in it but pontificate self-righteously with an all-knowing attitude about weighty matters like “the forces that are tearing India apart,” “the urban/rural Indian experience,” “my growing up in small town story,” “the mental geography of an urban Indian,” “what it is like to be a woman in India,” and so on and on and on. What you have here is a bunch of English-educated ignoramuses with some felicity for wielding the English language fed on a heady diet of mass media and equipped with talent for trite-writing.