The new James Bond’s Indian connection

James Bond movies have always been blockbusters – but the books? Nah. Nobody ever really reads them. The Bond movies simply borrow the title and the characters from the books but the plot is totally different. Since the death of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, the Fleming literary estate has commissioned other writers to continue the Bond series. The

newest offering from respected novelist Sebastian Faulks has changed everything – his new Bond book, Devil May Care, has become a bestseller overnight. Fans are queuing up outside bookstores to get a copy in the U.K and U.S. This has never happened to a Bond book before.

But here is the really interesting story behind the writing of the new Bond book. The inspiration for it was an Indian named Vakeel, Fali Vakeel, an advertising man from Mumbai. Sebastian Faulks in a recent interview revealed that when he was in boarding school in England, his classmate, Vakeel, introduced him to the James Bond books by Fleming. Now so many decades later, Faulks remembered to dedicate Devil May Care to his schoolmate. They had not kept in touch, and when Faulks began to search for his old hostel mate, it turned out he was living in Bombay, after all. Last week, Vakeel was flown to London to participate in the book launch. Devil May Care, the 33 rd Bond book, is likely to follow Quantum of Solance as the next Daniel Craig movie.