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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.
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.
Recent entries
Ah, modern times. Check out these two amazing news headlines: Community ostracises woman touched by outsider Muslims on social…
Just back from the Galle Lit Fest, rested, and all set to resume blogging. Let me begin with the…
In a few hours, I’m off to the Galle Literary Festival. Blogging will be light till I’m back in…
Reader Ruchir Khare writes in to point me to this passage from the Johann Hari piece on Dubai that…
The WTF statement of the week comes from a Dubai cop: The woman confessed that she had sexual intercourse…
16 April, 2009
The Erection Commission Of India
The Election Commission of India has brought out a Handbook for Candidates (pdf link) this year that contains the following remarkable lines:
DEFACEMENT OF PUBLIC OR PRIVATE PROPERTY
Many of the State/Union territories have laws to prevent the defacement of property, which term includes any building, structure, hut, wall, tree, fence, post, pole or any other erection.
I hope you understand the significance of this. All these years you have believed that an erection is a natural event, containing no threat to democracy. But you were wrong. True, erections themselves are not illegal, but their defacement might be—and every erection carries within it the seeds of its own defacement. Furthermore, it could be argued that the thought of this defacement is what causes the erection in the first place, and thus there is no further need for the cops to prove intent.
I wonder if the government has Erection Commissioners to monitor such laws. If so, wouldn’t pretty buxom women in revealing clothes be the best candidates for the job? They could cause the crime they are out to punish, thus meeting their targets with ease. I can just about imagine one such erection commissioner striding over to me, her hips swaying, her chest thrust forward, her lips erotically apart, saying: “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you breaking the law?”
Ah, I love life in the world’s biggest democracy.
(Link via email from Pratap Bhanu Mehta.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
