NLU Delhi student Apoorva Sharma has won the 2010 NUJS Kolkata fiction writing competition with a prequel to the classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, adding his own legal twist that Douglas Adams would have no doubt approved of.
Sharma was judged the winner of the competition for his short story Preludes (Being the untold back story of Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent), winning Rs 12,000 in prize money.
As well as setting up the characters and events taking place before the first book of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series, Sharma described the star system of Beutelgeuse, its teenage inhabitants Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the universe's largest robotics company Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
"The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (or SiriCorp for short) had, largely through inspired advertising campaigns, murderous litigation and the occasional murder, managed to corner the market for the robotics industry in the galaxy. As a result of this, the legal wing of SiriCorp occupied the entire landmass of all the planets of the stellar system," wrote Sharma.
"The SiriCorp legal wing had gained a reputation among aspiring lawyers. It was where a lawyer went to sell his/her/other soul to whatever deity his/her/other particular religion defined as a 'devil'. But the pay was good and Siricorp ended up employing a staggering forty percent of all practising lawyers of the galaxy. (Another thirty percent were the permanent counsel for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)."
The runner-up story for Rs 8,000 was the loosely Robinson Crusoe-inspired science-fiction shipwrecking tale Strafanstalt Isle Bhoomika Tiwari of NLIU Bhopal.
Shikha Rastogi of NLU Cuttack won third prize of Rs 6,000 for Escapade, which is the story of Jekyll and Hyde with an HG Wells twist.
The brief for the competition was to base the story around one of five famous fiction novels: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robinson Crusoe, Five Point Someone, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or A Christmas Carol.
The judge was Kolkata author and advertising consultant Anjana Basu.
Download the winning entry Preludes here.
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Can you tell us any one reason how NLU delhi could have contributed to Apoorva's literary skills? Congrats to her. It his her own skills and talents that won her the prize.
NLU delhi is an upcoming college. But to say that it will overtake likes of nls and nujs (and that too in this context) in five years is foolhardy. 10 years down the line, we'll see. Congrats to Apoorva once again.
Also, Congratulations Bhoomika from NLIU and Shikha from NLUO :-)
thenujsblogs.blogspot.com/2010/03/second-nujs-fiction-competition.html
for more information.
Vaneesha Jain was the convenor.
Happy writing,
Kian
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