The upside of living a life as a hack on Grub Street is that you get to fulfil at least one childhood dream: over the years, you will meet most of the authors whose works you admire. (In the Indian pantheon, at any rate, and if they aren’t exactly as bowled over by the prospect of meeting you, well, one journo’s perk is another writer’s tedious evening.)

But there is one indomitable corner of Indian writing in English that has proved to be completely impenetrable to the blandishments of journalists, and this is the hallowed space occupied by Rohinton Mistry.

A short while ago, Oprah Winfrey gave me another reason to want to meet the author of Tales From Firozsha Baag, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance: she selected the last-named of his books for her Oprah Book Club.

This, as a previous Oprah selectee Jonathan Franzen attested to, is not always an honour graciously accepted. Franzen, whose The Corrections shot from being just an acclaimed novel to occupying the second spot on amazon.com’s Hot 100 list after Oprah spake, was somewhat dismayed by the selection.

Ms Winfrey’s confessional show, which panders to the lowest common denominator, is not necessarily the platform Franzen wanted to occupy. But then he was roundly castigated for being highbrow and, presumably his publishers pointed out that Winfrey was doing for his sales figures what Monica Lewinsky had done for the Presidential libido.

The reason I want, more than ever, to meet Rohinton Mistry is to ask him how it feels — Oprah’s middle-of-the-road status as a literary commentator notwithstanding — to see A Fine Balance move in the space of one short week from genteel literary success to runaway bestseller.

The week before Mistry was Oprahed, A Fine Balance was somewhere in the deep thousands, in a slot one would characterise as respectable rather than brilliant, on both the amazon.com and the barnesandnoble.com lists.

After the announcement, A Fine Balance occupied, for one dizzy day, the eighth spot on the amazon.com list and is now coasting along peacefully at about 23 on the Hot 100 — not bad at all, considering it has to vie for attention with the new Christmas releases. The numbers tell their own story: the Vintage edition had 64,500 copies in print pre-Oprah, and printed an additional 700,000 post the announcement.

Mistry’s not the only one with much to celebrate this week. Sage, the venerable scholarly publishing house that set up an imprint in India in conjunction with Tejeshwar Singh, completes 20 years of its existence this year.

Not a bad record for an imprint that began, as Singh writes, “from one room over a garage, with two employees, a portable typewriter, a table and a filing cabinet.” It now has over 700 books in print and publishes 19 journals, and we can only hope that its tribe of authors will continue to increase.

Arundhati Roy was also breaking out the champagne — okay, the red wine — with the publication of the “definitive” version of her collected essays and non-fiction writings, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, by Penguin India. Sanjeev Saith and Tarun Tejpal, who’d published The God of Small Things under the IndiaInk imprint, were there to cheer her on.

Penguin’s David Davidar could barely contain his exuberance, for once letting his excitement show. A few years ago, I’d asked him whether there were any authors he felt Penguin had missed out on. “Arundhati Roy,” he’d answered without any hesitation, “and Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Jhumpa Lahiri. One way or another, we’ve done all the rest.” That’s one down, two to go.

Postscript: In my tribute to the late Agha Shahid Ali, I omitted to mention that the poet was an alumni of Hindu College. Just to lay all questions of bias to rest, let me add that while Stephens’ produced the likes of Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor and Rukun Advani, Hindu specialised in poets, producing Sudeep Sen as well as Shahid.

Incidentally, the “other” Hindu College, or Presidency as it is now known, in Calcutta, had Henry Vivian Derozio on its staff, has produced a long line of writers from Harish Chunder Mukherjee down to Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, and so perhaps should be considered superior to both Stephens’ and Hindu!