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
This personal essay by me appears in the winter edition of Forbes Life India. I feel the ground sway…
I’m amazed that India hasn’t yet woken up to the fact that Himesh Reshammiya is the new Govinda. I…
If you thought Ponytail’s speech the other day was funny, wait till you see this: Vishwa Bandhu Gupta, former…
The New York Times reports: A video of a dog apparently mourning the death of his owner at a…
Huffington Post reports: Glenn Beck called Hurricane Irene a “blessing” on his Friday radio show, saying it would teach…
13 February, 2009
Four Minutes And 55 Seconds
The High Court in New Delhi is so behind in its work that it could take up to 466 years to clear the enormous backlog, the court’s chief justice said in a damning report that illustrates the decrepitude of India’s judicial system.
The Delhi High Court races through each case in an average of four minutes and 55 seconds but still has tens of thousands of cases pending, including upward of 600 that are more than 20 years old, according to the report.
More than the 466 years, it’s the four minutes and 55 seconds that blows my mind. Imagine—your neighbour steals your ox, and you file a case against him, and it goes to the high court. And then you wait and wait and wait. As science advances, you undergo fancy therapies that slow the aging process. The ox dies. The children of the ox die. Generations of oxen pass on to the great farm in the sky. Your neighbour dies, but you keep his brain preserved in a vat. All your organs give way, but you battle on, kept alive by technology, yet afraid to exhale too hard for fear of causing the final malfunction. And then, finally, after 466 years, in 2475 AD, your case is finally heard.
After four minutes and 55 seconds of deliberations the judge, a GoogRoSoft supercomputer, decides that you have lost. All the witnesses are dead, as is the ox.
“I waited so long for this,” you wheeze. “So long, so long. This is not fair.”
“Well,” says the GoogRoSoft supercomputer, “you can always appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Meanwhile, in the vat, the brain throbs with laughter.
(HT: Reader Dev, who also points me to the Supreme Court’s definition of ‘idiot’. Wonder how long they took to come up with that.)
Posted by Amit Varma in
