Browse Archives
By Category
By Date
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
I feel hugely sorry for this kid. In her world, it might be a huge deal to become “the…
The Times of India reports: The government has banned Fashion TV for nine days after finding a program it…
Forget Robert McKee and Syd Field: If you want to learn how to make a successful Hollywood film, watch…
Daniel Pepper of CMS has a worrying story up on how RTI activists in India are increasingly facing a…
This sentence says so much about the level of parliamentary debate in India today: Finally, marshals were called in…
10 October, 2008
Sarah Palin, Post-Turtle
Ben Macintyre introduces us to the term ‘post-turtle’:
A 75-year-old Texas rancher recently explained this term to a country doctor. The conversation turned to the US election, and Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy, and the old rancher observed: “Well, ya know, Palin is a post-turtle.” The bemused doctor asked what a post-turtle was, and the old man replied: “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post-turtle.” The rancher continued: “You know she didn’t get up there by herself, she doesn’t belong up there, she doesn’t know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.”
I love the term, and I really shouldn’t quibble, but it falls short in one sense—this turtle wanted to be on that fence post. Indeed, when it was asked to get up there, it did not blink—and now it wants to live up on the tallest fence post of all, in case Putin rears his head and all. No real turtle would have such self-delusion.
And really, turtles are sweet little things, and protecting them from such cruel analogies is yet another good reason to not vote for Sarah Palin.
(Link via email from Vikram Chandrashekar. More Palin: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.)
Update (October 11): Sanjeev emails to say that the analogy has been used earlier while talking about Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton.
Maybe it applies to all politicians. After all, as Don Boudreaux once asked, who’s qualified to run a country?
Posted by Amit Varma in
Politics
