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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…

16 January, 2008

The Private Treaties of the Times of India

Reader Bhushan Nigale writes in:

I was expecting you to link to the hard-hitting Mint story (incidentally published on the 15th of January) on ‘Private Treaties’, BCCL’s yet another innovation that compromises journalistic and ethical values. Instead, I found your post on ‘Classical Liberalism and the Times of India’. This amused me no end.

I refuse to believe that the newspaper can stand for anything, except for protecting and furthering the interests of its ‘private treaties’ and ‘MediaNet’ clients. It stands for violating the trust of its readers, by selling news for money and equity.

Fair point, and had I noticed the Mint story, I would certainly have blogged about it. I have no respect for some of the practices of the Times of India, as regular readers would have noted. If their edit pages do end up improving, that won’t absolve them of their business practices—but it is still worth commenting on.

Update: Devangshu points me to an earlier story on private treaties in Business Standard:

The Times of India publisher Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd must be doing something right with its three-year-old Private Treaties division.

Otherwise newspaper groups such as HT Media Ltd, Dainik Bhaskar and Dainik Jagran would not be eager to duplicate their arch rival’s business plan.

Read the rest here.

Posted by Amit Varma in Journalism | Media

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