Browse Archives

By Category

By Date



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.


I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.


If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho


Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.


And ah, my posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.


Bastiat Prize 2007 Winner

Recent entries

The Difference Between ‘IMO’ and ‘IMHO’…

... is that ‘imho’ inevitably carries far more arrogance with it. When humility has to be claimed it is…

The Times of India Guide to Leching

This is very funny. Except that it’s not. WTF? * And really, just see these observations: If you’re observing…

The Blog Song

Wilbur Sargunaraj is a genius. Check out his masterful music video, “Blog Song”: [embedded video] He should totally follow…

Keep Praying

The WTF statement of the day comes from Sheila Dikshit with regard to the Commonwealth Games: I only keep…

Shakti Kapoor Bites Anil Kapoor

I’m assuming this is a publicity stunt. But even then, there is the question, who think of such stunts?…

27 October, 2009

The Bastiat Winners for 2009…

... have been announced. My congratulations to John Hasnas for winning the Bastiat Prize for 2009. Hasnas beat out former winner Robert Guest with this superb piece of his: “The ‘Unseen’ Deserve Empathy, Too.” Going by previous years, I have no doubt that all the nominees were most worthy.

I won the prize in 2007, and the prize candlestick, which I can see now across the room, is one of my treasured possessions. The prize money enabled me to give up freelance journalism and focus on writing novels, an effect that, for the Bastiat organisers, was surely in the category of “that which is not seen.” I’d count it as a one-off positive externality, so all’s well.

This year, the Bastiat guys also instituted a separate prize for online journalism. I was one of the judges for this, along with Jimmy Wales, Esther Dyson and Scott Banister, and was blown away by the quality of the entries I read. I’m delighted that the prize has been shared by Daniel Hannan and Shikha Dalmia—both of them deserve it, and this is a fitting result.

*

Oh, and here’s the column I wrote after I won the Bastiat Prize in 2007: “Remembering Frédéric Bastiat.” And here are the three pieces I’d entered that won me the prize:

“Where’s the Freedom Party?”
“A Beast Called Government.”
“The Devil’s Compassion.”

You can read all 48 installments of my column for Mint, Thinking it Through, here.

Posted by Amit Varma in Economics | Freedom | Personal

Copyright (C) India Uncut - http://indiauncut.com
All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Email: amitblogs@gmail.com
This article is permanently archived at:
http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/the-bastiat-winners-for-2009/