Since The Book of Answers, my first fiction novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, three sorts of comments have come my way —

Very good! Always knew you had it in you!

Enjoy the moment, friend. A nomination is as good as a prize.

It's only a prize.

It's difficult not to enjoy the moment, and only a rank cynic would turn up his nose at it. After all, this is the one irrefutable thing to have happened to my book since its relatively low-key launch in India last year by HarperCollins. The Commonwealth website points out that authors from 54 Commonwealth countries are eligible to compete, and I know that English is lingua franca for many of them. Perhaps a truthful assertion would be that The Book of Answers has been judged to be among the 18 books most worth reading in 2012.

Well, when I put it that way. What a lovely feeling.

What a lovely deception, actually. The inner cynic points out several flaws right away. For instance, one doesn't know how many books were submitted, and from how many countries. Perhaps these are the top 18 from a mere 200 books entered for the prize from a global total of — how many? How many books were published last year anyway?

Bowker, the agency that assigns ISBN numbers, has statistics only upto 2009. In that year, 288,355 books were published traditionally, and 764,448 books were self-published, a grand total of over a million books. Of course, the larger, self-published number there would be ineligible for the Commonwealth Book Prize, since only publishers may nominate authors.

Ahem. It seems we 18 shortlistees might not represent such a fair culling out of all the million plus books published after all.

What about the third comment, It's only a prize? Well, it's always only a prize. A better point for me to remind myself of is that it's only a judgment. For example, the jury of the Man Asia Literary Prize took a different view of The Book of Answers, and it appeared neither on a longlist nor a shortlist.

I reflect on the number of judgments that play into moving towards a prize such as this. First, a publisher judges the book to be worth publishing; then worth submitting for a prize. A judge or several find the book sufficiently interesting to argue for it to shortlisted. Personal preferences play into such choices as much as listed criteria. And as much as I trust any professional panel of judges to want to do their equitable best, selecting a book for anything at all is a professional judgment subject to personal limitations. A good judge, in my opinion, represents the apogee of enlightened subjectivity.

At the end of it, it is necessary for all authors that find themselves in such lists to recall the reasons why they wrote the book in the first place. I only became aware of the Commonwealth Book Prize last week, so you may be sure I did not have that in mind. Comment #1, I always knew you had it in you does not apply here. Nothing was further from my mind that winning any prize or being in any shortlist in my three years of writing this.

More to the point, I wrote The Book of Answers kicking and screaming that I was not really an author of any kind. When it was complete, I took my agent's word for it that the story had merit, and was grateful that HarperCollins agreed with him. As many have shredded it as exalted it. Many have given up quarter way through the tome, but at least two have read it twice. To this day, I find it impossible to read it as though I had not written it; I grope like a blind man for a glimmering of its worth and readability.

Writing this novel made me realize how much I enjoyed writing a novel, and how much I looked forward to the next. I know now that today's publishing has a high rate of infant mortality, so anything, anything at all, that helps set one book apart from the rest and draws attention to it, is manna from heaven.

A good author, like a good Zen monk, ought to be able to just cross the bridge and keep walking without a look back.