How Indian is Kiran Desai?

By John Cheeran
Kiran Desai has won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, a great piece of news for literate Indians.
But how Indian is Desai?
I believe she spends her time between London and New York.
I haven't read the Inheritance of Loss and going by what Pankaj Mishra wrote in The New York Times, it seems to be my loss.
One thing, however, is sure.
Desai will never be able to whip up the hype that Arundhathi Roy created through her God of Small Things in 1996, a phrase that spread like wildfire among the Indian middleclass.
Roy, unlike Desai, was the first Indian woman to win a major literary prize and she was truly made and mellowed 100 per cent in our own land.
That's something special indeed, even though I find Roy's political essays puerile to the core.