In his effusive praise for Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, politician and author Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday asserted that the "overdue" Nobel Prize should not be withheld any longer from the "greatest living Indian writer".

Tharoor recently finished the Mumbai-born author's latest novel, "Victory City", which is based around the medieval city of Hampi, the ruined site in Karnataka of the Vijayanagara empire.