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My Friend Sancho

My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.


To buy it online from the US, click here.


I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.


If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho


Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.


And ah, my posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.


Bastiat Prize 2007 Winner

Recent entries

The Curse of Vikram Bhatt

Speaking about his new film Shaapit, Vikram Bhatt says: I did some research and a very important fact emerged.…

Every Dog Has Its Bath

The Indian Express informs us of the invention of a washing machine for pets, which “gives pets an automatic…

Until Death Etc Etc

The WTF opening sentence of the day comes from a Rediff report: According to the National Crime Record Bureau…

A Garland for the Queen

Heard about the recent furore over the garland of thousand-rupee notes that was presented to her Royal Majesty, Mayawati,…

Prodigy

I feel hugely sorry for this kid. In her world, it might be a huge deal to become “the…

07 October, 2009

A Dispute Over Jurisdiction

DNA has a story today about an incident that took place last evening in Delhi. At about 8.30pm, two teachers, a man and a woman, stepped out of a computer training institute in Sultanpuri in West Delhi. Three ruffians started eve-teasing harassing the woman. The man with her, named Prakash, protested, and got beaten up. And the woman was dragged away. Here’s the next line of the news report:

Although Prakash was quick to alert the police, tracing the victim took time because of a dispute over jurisdiction between officers of Nangloi and Sultanpuri police stations. When finally the girl was found, it was too late. She was lying near the tracks in a bruised condition.

Naturally, she had been gang-raped. All while the cops were busy in “a dispute over jurisdiction”.

This is hardly an unusual story. Such petty bureaucracy is common in India, and our cops are generally an apathetic lot. Indeed, if you’re not well heeled or well connected, you’d be lucky getting any help from them at all. They are tenured and unaccountable, and I guarantee you that no action will be taken against the policemen who argued about technicalities yesterday while a woman was being raped down by the railway tracks.

So why would they care?

Update: I’ve replaced the phrase ‘eve-teasing’ in the post with ‘harassing’ because of the following email I received from my friend Nilanjana Roy (quoted with permission):

I’m not usually an advocate of politically correct speech, but shouldn’t we reconsider using terms like eve-teasing? I know we all do, this is India, but I have hated that term for years for its inaccuracy. Having been at the receiving end of “eve-teasing”, I’d say it’s a combination of verbal abuse and physical assault, and that even “molestation” doesn’t cover the actual effects that kind of aggression has on the victim. “Harassing”, “threatening” or “assaulting” might be better equivalents.

Dead right. We use the term out of habit, but it’s imprecise—and I’m hardly surprised that a lit critic was the one to point out this imprecision to me! Another word I can think of that gives an innocuous tinge to a major social problem: ‘Ragging’.

Update 2: Thanks to Twitter, I’ve discovered that the “dispute over jurisdiction” was actually against the rules. @gkjohn’s query about this was answered by @mumbaicentral thus: (1, 2):

1. ... one Police Station can go wherever it wants to nab a suspect. Here any PS could have lodged FIR and caught the guys.

2. 5(c), FIR Format “In case occurrence outside limit of this PS”. Such situations have been envisaged: these guys were just assholes.

So there you have it.

And Twitter rocks. You guys following me yet

Posted by Amit Varma in India | News

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