Browse Archives
By Category
By Date
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.
Recent entries
So it’s about 10.45pm, and we’re headed in a tourist taxi to Siena Village, a resort a few kilometres…
I don’t know why, but I find this kind of funny. And what’s with the quote marks in that…
Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired: Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that…
So while everyone’s celebrating the arrival of Akhilesh Yadav and how he’s revitalised the Samajwadi Party and UP Politics,…
... is done. The next time India walk out to play a Test match, my favourite sportsman of all…
20 July, 2009
‘The Process Of Population Growth’
Speaking of euphemisms, here’s a masterful one from a WTF quote by India’s health and family welfare minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad:
Electricity in our villages can help control population growth. Electricity will lead to television in houses, which will lead to population control. When there is no light, people get engaged in the process of population growth.
So the next time you want to ask someone to get in bed with you, don’t be crude, don’t say something like Let’s bonk or I want to get into your pants or Let’s make laowe, baybeh, or suchlike. No, just look serious and wonkish and say, Would you like to engage in the process of population growth with me?
Doesn’t that sound much classier? No? Okay, never mind.
*
And while on Azad’s quote, it’s WTF for two reasons:
One, the government has no business regulating what consenting adults do in their bedrooms, whether this relates to sexual practices or procreative choices. How many kids a couple wants to have should be that couple’s decision alone. Anything else is a violation.
Two, despite what we’re taught in school, India’s problem is not its population. Every new child born anywhere is an invaluable resource, and in the right sort of environment, this resource produces more than it consumes. We don’t need to control population growth; instead, we need to work at creating an environment where every person has the scope to unleash his or her full potential.
For an elaboration on this, do read this old piece by me, The Population Myth.
(Link via separate emails from Ganesh Hegde, WrestlingMind and Luv.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
