An eminent author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist, Gita Mehta was the elder sister of Naveen Patnaik and businessman Prem Patnaik.
'I feel I must decline as there is a general election looming and the timing of the award might be misconstrued, causing embarrassment both to the government and myself, which I would much regret,' Gita Mehta said.
Celebrated novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who has just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, spoke to Arthur J Pais of Rediff.com in 2009, recalling his wonderful association with Sonny Mehta, editor-in-chief of Alfred A Knopf and chairman of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, who had just won a special award.
The author of 11 novels, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, having published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970.
Indian Americans are not just shining in the fields of technology, education and management. You can now spot them every where... in politics, in research, in the movies and even on YouTube, says Ignatius Chithelen.Indian Americans are not just shining in the fields of technology, education and management. You can now spot them every where... in politics, in research, in the movies and even on YouTube, says Ignatius Chithelen.
'In being dismissive of Naveen, his colleagues showed incredible naivety.' 'On the few occasions that he put his foot down, the overconfident party leaders, who believed they were using him and not the other way around, failed to read the signs of what was to come.'