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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.


Bastiat Prize 2007 Winner

Recent entries

Elephant in Kerala

So it’s about 10.45pm, and we’re headed in a tourist taxi to Siena Village, a resort a few kilometres…

‘The Businessman Panicked’

I don’t know why, but I find this kind of funny. And what’s with the quote marks in that…

III = III + III

Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired: Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that…

‘An Offer They Could Not Refuse’

So while everyone’s celebrating the arrival of Akhilesh Yadav and how he’s revitalised the Samajwadi Party and UP Politics,…

Good Old Dravid…

... is done. The next time India walk out to play a Test match, my favourite sportsman of all…

08 December, 2007

Why Bloggers Blog

In an excellent interview, Tyler Cowen is asked about blogging:

Knowlege@Wharton: You are a writer and co-founder of the popular economics blog MarginalRevolution.com. How does your inner economist explain blogging? What is the incentive for people like yourself to offer high-quality goods and services online for free? 

Tyler Cowen: Blogging is fun. I’ve made friends through blogging, but most of all I have learned a lot. I think it has made me a better economist. I would also say it’s helped me to discover my inner economist. Because when you are blogging for real people, they don’t want techno babble. They don’t want jargon. They’re like, “What can you tell me that I actually care about?” Most of the ideas in this book, in one way or another, came out of blogging.

Knowlege@Wharton: So we can be motivated to do a lot of work, even highly skilled work, just because it’s fun?

Cowen: Absolutely. A lot of science works on the same basis. It’s true that scientists get paid, but typically they don’t get paid more, or much more, for discovering something that will make them famous. They do it because they love science, or because they want the recognition or because they just stumble upon it. Einstein was never a wealthy man but he worked very hard. So blogging is a new form of an old idea: that people do great things for free. Adam Smith didn’t get paid much for writing Wealth of Nations, even though it’s a long book that required a lot of work. He had an inner drive to get his ideas out there.

I’ve often been asked, and have often asked myself, why I blog. I spend more time on it than any other productive activity, and make only a small fraction of an anyway-insignificant income from it. The above excerpt answers the question rather well. 

Posted by Amit Varma in Blogging | Personal

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