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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.
Recent entries
Check out this piece by Shikha Dalmia on the role that market forces play in perpetuating the caste system.…
Our right-wing lunatics are so funny sometimes that it’s hard to hate them. Balbir Punj has a bizarre (but…
Having resumed blogging, it was natural for me to head over to the ToI site for the potential double…
The Hindustan Times reports that two Karnataka ministers were caught watching pornographic videos “when the house was in session.”…
This personal essay by me appears in the winter edition of Forbes Life India. I feel the ground sway…
22 January, 2010
Fat Man Flying
Reuters informs us that Air France has denied that it plans to charge overweight passengers extra. There had earlier been speculation that they could “bar obese passengers from flying.” Well, that’s been clarified.
Here’s the interesting thing, though: fat passengers do cost more for the airline to fly then thin passengers, as greater weight leads to more fuel consumption. It would politically incorrect and logistically impractical to charge passengers according to weight, of course, so the airlines don’t make that a factor in their pricing. As a result, thin passengers end up subsidizing fat ones.
I would have complained about this bitterly in my college days, when I was slim like a male Kate Moss. But I couldn’t afford to fly in those days, and had no stake in the matter. Today, I’m probably one of those benefiting from the subsidy, so you won’t find me complaining anytime soon. It’s all worked out well.
(NDTV link via email from Sudipta.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
