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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

So it’s about 10.45pm, and we’re headed in a tourist taxi to Siena Village, a resort a few kilometres…

‘The Businessman Panicked’

I don’t know why, but I find this kind of funny. And what’s with the quote marks in that…

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…

05 February, 2008

Long, Healthy Lives…

... are hazardous to the taxpayer, reports IBNLive.com. A study has found that “the health costs of thin and healthy people in adulthood are more expensive than those of either fat people or smokers,” and “healthy people live longer and may develop long-term diseases in old age like Alzheimer’s which are very expensive to treat.”

The solution here is not to prevent people from living long and healthy lives. Instead, it is to question what our governments do with the money it coerces out of its citizens. Is it fair to take money from the obese to pay the medical costs of the relatively healthy, as is effectively the case here? Would it be fair the other way around? Is the government taxing us to provide certain basic services like law and order, or to redistribute it according to the interests of a few politicians in power?

I hope to live a long and healthy life— and even if I don’t, to be a burden on nobody. Is that unusual?

(Link via email from Andy.)

Posted by Amit Varma in Economics | Old memes | Taxes | Small thoughts

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