For 37-year-old Vikram Chandra, author of Love and Longing in Bombay, whose second book which won him the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, accolades may not mean much. But try as he may, he cannot get away from the fact that it is prizes like this one - his book beat Arundhati Roy's much-touted Booker winner - which attract attention and readers. ``I know, it's a funny situation,'' he admits wryly.

And for someone who got into writing by chance, the slightly-built Chandra has certainly been attracting attention. He was at Columbia University's film school when he came across Colonel J S Skinner's life, which inspired him to take to writing his first book Red Earth Pouring Rain. Today, Chandra, who prefers to call himself a semi-expatriate, teaches creative writing at Washington DC but lives in Mumbai.

``Writing is a lonely process - it's an investigation into yourself. I usually have a landscape in mind and know I am moving there. I like complicated characters, layered in terms of plots, turns and twists and a kind of beauty that gives aesthetic pleasure,'' he says.

Chandra's fascination with narrative is obvious. ``Sometimes characters develop a mind of their own and resist changes. Narrative has its own vitality and mine needs space.'' That, Chandra believes, is the reason why he is not comfortable writing poetry. But it has not stopped him from toying with the idea of writing a screenplay for a Hindi film. For a Bollywood film? ``Yeah, with naach gaana,'' he smiles.

Bollywood flicks have greatly influenced him since his school days. ``I was expelled from Mayo College when the authorities caught me coming back from seeing Dharam Veer the fifth time, but they allowed me to return for my board exams,'' he chuckles.

Besides, as Chandra says, ``I come from quite a filmi family.'' Mom Kamna Chandra has written screenplays of Prem Rog, Chandni, 1942 - A love story and Kareeb, among others, while his sisters are Tanuja (director of the Bollywood flick, Dushman) and Anupama (the film journalist married to director Vidhu Vinod Chopra).

But would a Bollywood potboiler be his style? Touched to the quick, Chandra retorts almost immediately, ``The distinction made between an art and a commercial film is a crude error. I think it finds its roots in the modern Indian discomfort with the idea of pleasure, a Puritanism that has invaded middle-class India.'' If realistic fiction can involve extraordinary incidents, he wonders why films cannot do the same. ``I am not defending nonsense but do you have to bore the hell out of everyone?''

The Hindi film will have to wait. Chandra is busy working on his next book, a novel based on a character Sartaj Singh, who appears in one of the short stories in Love and Longing in Bombay. But he is not telling much. ``I am a little superstitious in these matters,'' he smiles sheepishly.