Browse Archives
By Category
By Date
My Friend Sancho
My first book, My Friend Sancho, was published in May 2009, and went on to become the biggest selling debut novel released that year in India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and had earlier been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho
Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.
My posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.
Recent entries
So it’s about 10.45pm, and we’re headed in a tourist taxi to Siena Village, a resort a few kilometres…
I don’t know why, but I find this kind of funny. And what’s with the quote marks in that…
Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired: Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that…
So while everyone’s celebrating the arrival of Akhilesh Yadav and how he’s revitalised the Samajwadi Party and UP Politics,…
... is done. The next time India walk out to play a Test match, my favourite sportsman of all…
09 July, 2007
A strange cocktail of contradictions
Barkha Dutt’s recent columns in the Hindustan Times have been excellent, and in her latest one she writes:
For too long now, any discussion on the state of India’s largest minority has been entangled in extremities. On the one side is the intolerance and prejudice of the Right, and at the other end is the patronising, politically correct blindness of the Left. There is the indisputable fact that ordinary Muslims in India live on the margins of development and economic wellness. Then, there are the ‘secular’ politicians who play self-appointed benefactors with one eye constantly on elections. There is the unforgettable blemish of the administration-aided riots in Gujarat. And finally, there are the fatwa-happy fanatics — the maulvis and preachers who drag their own people down the hellhole of hatred and are never condemned as strongly as they should be.
It’s time to ask ourselves a blunt question: what exactly is this strange cocktail of contradictions breeding?
There are no easy answers to that question, and Dutt doesn’t pretend otherwise. But it’s important to ask—political correctness be damned.
Posted by Amit Varma in
