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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
It’s somehow appropriate for a lazy half-Bong to come up with a sleeper hit. Open Magazine‘s latest issue has…
This is surely the sentence of the year: My friends waved at me from the buffet counter not knowing…
Finally there is scientific research to validate my long-held belief that boobs are wonderful. A rather bizarre study carried…
Dear P Chidambaram A newspaper report today states that you are willing “to drop all cases against Telangana activists…
If you go to Vile Parle station, you will come across the following sign stuck between two ticket windows:…
07 September, 2009
Where Your Taxes Go: 41
On a Rs 42 crore mansion, on “a sprawling 1,00,000 sq ft area”, for Mayawati.
Mayawati’s latest mansion is to be seen to be believed. With 18-ft high stone walls and matching copper and brass gates, it looks more like a fortress on Mall Avenue, the most prized address in Lucknow. With every second house here having been taken over directly or indirectly by Mayawati—be it in the name of the Bahujan Trust or the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) office—her detractors, including Mulayam Yadav, have taken to calling the street ‘Maya Avenue’.
The chateau-like bungalow betrays Mayawati’s weakness for pink Dholpur stone and expensive granite.
‘Maya Avenue’ is a suitable name in more ways than one. The nugget I found most delicious in the report was that to make room for her bungalow, “Behenji ordered that the Sugarcane Commissioner’s office shift out from next door.” A sugarcane commissioner? Why the fug do we need a sugarcane commissioner anyway?
Mayawati has featured in the Where Your Taxes Go series before, here and here. I’m no longer surprised at the scale of her excesses, though. The way our political system is structured, it is entirely rational to enjoy the spoils of power after you get to such a post. We elect governments not to serve us, but to rule us. As long as that is so, our rulers will take full advantage.
(Link via email from Noor. For more on how our government loots us, click here.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
