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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.


Bastiat Prize 2007 Winner

Recent entries

Elephant in Kerala

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‘The Businessman Panicked’

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III = III + III

Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired: Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that…

‘An Offer They Could Not Refuse’

So while everyone’s celebrating the arrival of Akhilesh Yadav and how he’s revitalised the Samajwadi Party and UP Politics,…

Good Old Dravid…

... is done. The next time India walk out to play a Test match, my favourite sportsman of all…

15 August, 2007

Everything near becomes far

In 1977, in a lecture on blindness, the by-then partially blind Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

I want to end with a line of Goethe: ”Alles Nahe werde fern,” everything near becomes far. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes far. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.

Goethe could be referring not only to twilight but to life. All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude—except that the supreme solitude is death. And “everything near becomes far” also refers to the slow process of blindness, of which I hoped to show, speaking tonight, that it is not a complete misfortune. It is one more instrument among the many—all of them so strange—that fate or chance provide.

This lecture is one among many in Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions.

Posted by Amit Varma in Arts and entertainment | Excerpts

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