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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

I’m All In: Confessions of a Poker Obsessive

This personal essay by me appears in the winter edition of Forbes Life India. I feel the ground sway…

‘No Touching, Only Seeing, Okay?’

I’m amazed that India hasn’t yet woken up to the fact that Himesh Reshammiya is the new Govinda. I…

Vishwa Bandhu Gupta and Cloud Computing

If you thought Ponytail’s speech the other day was funny, wait till you see this: Vishwa Bandhu Gupta, former…

The Sadness of Dogs

The New York Times reports: A video of a dog apparently mourning the death of his owner at a…

‘That is Not a Lump, Mr Beck, It is a Blessing’

Huffington Post reports: Glenn Beck called Hurricane Irene a “blessing” on his Friday radio show, saying it would teach…

01 July, 2009

Spelling It Out

I’m just back from dinner with a few friends of mine, among them Anand Ramachandran and Salil Tripathi. They shared a couple of superb anecdotes that, with their permission, I’m reproducing here. The first is about when Anand’s dad, in the good old days when ISD calls cost a bomb and you had to scream into the phone, was spelling out ‘America’ to a friend.

The Friend: What did you say? Can you spell it out?

Anand’s Dad: America, da. A for Apple…

The Friend: A for Apple.

Anand’s Dad: M for Mother…

The Friend: What, what? M for what?

At this point, Salil told us a story about how he had to spell his name out for somebody.

Salil: My name is Salil Tripathi.

Somebody: Sorry? How do you spell that?

Salil: Salil. S for Singapore…

Somebody: How do you spell Singapore?

The possibilities are endless, you will note.

Update: Reader Seshagiri Sattiraju writes in:

I faced the opposite situation. Someone told me a word on the phone and I tried to spell it out for him

Me: Is it B as in Bombay?

Other Person: Not sure what B stands for…

Well, it could also stand for Mumbai, I guess.

Posted by Amit Varma in Blade

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