BWW RK Anand Short Story Prize 2024 - Jury Comments on the Winning Story

Response to the Winning Story

Indira Chandrasekhar

Excerpted and adapted from the comments made at the Prize Announcement at the Bangalore Literature Festival, 2024

There is a difference between recounting a story, and writing a story, that is creating a literary rendition of a tale. For the latter exercise demands refinement of text, an ability to evoke an emotional immersion, a crafting that transforms the story into art.

In one of her last public addresses, sections of which have been reproduced and made accessible in Marginalia, Susan Sontag, the American writer and feminist said: ‘A great writer (may I interject – those of us who strive to be great) of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people…’

In my opinion, Vrinda Baliga’s ‘Breakout’ does all of that – creates a world, responds to our world and crafts a fine piece of literature.

The story responds to the immense pressure that our educational system imposes on children, on students, a system that emphasises rote reproduction of learnt material over the development of imagination, critical thinking, and a celebration of the joy of learning and knowledge.

The story imagines a world, directed by the new creature in our midst – AI – Artificial Intelligence. Is AI a thinking being or a rote reproducer of information? Is it a saviour or a monster? Is it a new manifestation of the patriarchy?

The story is imbued with an underlying disquiet, an anxiety, a scary hopelessness that its very plausible characters must deal with.

But then, the plot reveals an underground resistance to mute acceptance and hints at the power of quiet sustained rebellion, and the story cleverly lifts its readers into a space of possibility.