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My Friend Sancho
My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
To buy it online from the US, click here.
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Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.
And ah, my posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.
Recent entries
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Daniel Pepper of CMS has a worrying story up on how RTI activists in India are increasingly facing a…
This sentence says so much about the level of parliamentary debate in India today: Finally, marshals were called in…
11 April, 2008
Dear Mitra Kalita
Dear Mitra
You write in your column today that your support of reservations “is not a socialist stance.” Quick question: Are you aware of the meaning of the word ‘socialist’?
A socialist society typically redistributes wealth—reservations redistribute opportunities. Same difference.
You speak about “universities (and eventually the private sector, I hope)” being “forced” to implement reservations. Forced? So you see coercion as the basis of social justice? That sounds familiar.
You write at the end of your piece: “[A] day might come in the rest of India where you ask two young men on a college campus what caste the other is—and each will say he doesn’t even know.” Well, I wasn’t aware of my caste in my college years, or that of my friends. With prosperity and an open economy, barriers of caste gradually erode. Yes, India has a long, long way to go before we’re prosperous enough and open enough, but consider that reservations actually increase one’s awareness of caste, and exacerbate tensions between them. You cannot fight injustice with injustice.
Warm regards
Amit
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Link via email from Nitin Pai. More open letters here.
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