Not everyone quits a job to think up a story of a rickshawpuller’s son who writes letters to “Mr Premier” Wen Jiabao over seven days. Not everyone wins the Man Booker Prize at the age of 33. Aravind Adiga has done both; the second he has managed by a whisker — he turns 34 a week from now on October 23.

After his debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker for 2008 and 50,000 pounds, Adiga, uncharacteristically beaming in a tux in London, said, “The first thing I’m going to do is find a bank I can put it in. I’m serious!” And then turned characteristically serious: “It was important for me to present someone from the colossal underclass, which is perhaps as big as 400 million, and to do so without sentimentality.”

In Booker’s 40th year, Adiga — the second youngest winner after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32 — bested fellow Indian Amitav Ghosh, Australian Steve Toltz, Irishman Sebastian Barry and Britons Linda Grant and Philip Hensher.

Michael Portillo, chairman of the five-member judging panel, gave the reason. “My criterion was ‘does it knock my socks off?’ and this one did,” he said. “What set this one apart was its originality. For many of us this was entirely new territory — the dark side of India.”

Adiga’s hero Balram Halwai sees Delhi, driving around in a Honda City. Three years ago, in his previous life as a journalist with Time magazine, Adiga too wandered, not in a car, picking up material for the book.

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