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 March, 2009
Defecation Statistics
In an article about sanitation in India, Jason Gale describes how a lady named Meera Devi rose before dawn each day, went to a patch outside her village, “pulled up her sari and defecated with the Taj Mahal in plain view.” Gale writes:
With that act, she added to the estimated 100,000 tons of human excrement that Indians leave each day in fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach, on banks that line rivers used for drinking and bathing and along roads jammed with scooters, trucks and pedestrians.
That is quite a sentence there, and I have two questions about it.
One, how was that estimate of “100,000 tons of human excrement” arrived at? What was it extrapolated from? How was the research to arrive at that figure done?
Two, given how specific Gale is about this, does that figure then not include excrement left in fields of rice or maize? Only “fields of potatoes, carrots and spinach”? Or is that detail thrown in only so that the prose seems descriptive?
I have no problems with the piece, mind you. Just in a quibbling mood, that’s all.
(HT: Nimai Mehta, who has a paper on the subject here—pdf link.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
India |
Journalism |
Media
