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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
I have three hypothetical questions for you guys. Humour me and try and read all the way through. One.…
I was on a CNN-IBN show earlier this evening, where the topic under discussion was the arrest of two…
I suppose I should display some empathy here, but I can’t help but be a little amused by the…
’Before anyone else was interested in the ornithology of terror he saw the gathering birds,’ Salman Rushdie writes about…
Check out this TED Talk by Tony Porter on how men get trapped in a ‘Manbox’—and women bear the…
05 March, 2009
Animal Alchemy
Graeme Wood, in a feature on Lalu Prasad Yadav’s achievements as India’s railways minister, writes:
When Lalu presented his latest budget to Parliament on February 13, he bragged, “Hathi ko cheetah bana diya” ("I have turned an elephant into a cheetah"). What’s his secret?
“Cow dung,” he says. “I have 350 cows, including bulls. Cow dung—no need of gas.”
A few paragraphs later, Wood quotes a civil servant named Sudhir Kumar as saying, “If there is money lying around, we can smell it.” I wish these quotes had been used out of context, they would have made India seem so delightfully exotic: a land where you apply cow dung on an elephant to turn it into a cheetah, and where natives can smell money. Sadly, Wood sticks to responsible journalism and does nothing of the kind.
Still, that cow dung bit isn’t quite explained…
(HT: Arun. Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109.)
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