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.
Category Archives: Blogging
That’s a line I particularly like from a poem by Space Bar, the newest contributor to Rave Out. That section’s coming along rather nicely, I think, and the already-healthy contributors list will have a couple of new additions in the next couple of weeks that will make it rock even more. Watch that space.
And yes, just as floors love feet, my keyboard loves my fingers. Such is the level of obsession there that I fear that such a love affair can only be doomed. Its offspring, of course, exist for your pleasure.
Update: You can pick up RSS feeds from here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 11 April, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging |
Personal
Oliver Kamm writes in the Guardian that “parasitic, political blogs tend not to enhance but poison healthy debate.”
Well, I’d point out here that debate tends “not to enhance but poison healthy debate.” That’s the nature of the beast. Open debates, especially, tend to degenerate into incoherence, particularly on the internet, where anyone can enter a conversation, and anonymity enables trolling.
Despite that, I’m not sure what to make of this proposal to have codes of conduct for bloggers. All bloggers already have implicit codes of conduct for themselves, manifest in the way they blog and moderate comments and so on, and their credibility and readership derives from that. I’m skeptical of a formally stated code of conduct, and don’t think it would serve any purpose. Except for debate.
(IHT link via email from Arun Verma.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 April, 2007 in
Blogging
Jimmy Wales is asked, in Time Magazine’s “10 Questions” section, why people contribute to Wikipedia. Is it altruism? He replies:
It’s realizing that doing intellectual things socially is a lot of fun--it makes sense. We don’t plan on paying people, either, to contribute. People don’t ask, “Gosh, why are all these people playing basketball for fun? Some people get paid a lot of money to do that.”
Bang on. Also, please stop asking me if I make any money through this website. Bounce bounce bounce.
Posted by Amit Varma on 31 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
So much to do, so little time. On a regular basis these days, I go through the cycle mentioned in the headline of this post. I wake up in the morning (somehow!), get to work, and soon fall behind schedule. Sometimes non-IU work does not allow me to post on this blog until lunch: immense guilt then comes. (As I mentioned here, guilt is a key reason for the frequency of my posts.) If, FSM forbid, I cannot blog by evening, despair sets it. And if the sun sets and the blog is still showing yesterday’s post, panic happens. I go on the internet then, and feel paralysed. What to blog? How can I make up for an entire day gone by?
Pretty much the same phenomenon happens with email as well. Often, when I am travelling, even if it is for a day, the emails pile up. So I use the immensely useful functionality that Gmail has, of starring a mail. The action is supposed to be my way of telling myself, “This is important and I will reply to this email later.” But the message that effectively gets communicated is, “You don’t have to worry about this right now. Chill. Do something else. You can come back to this.”
And, of course, I never do. If fact, the starred mails are so many, and so guilt-inducing, that I’m in denial much of the time. I do not dare to click on the folder. Panic arises at the thought, and alternates with resignation. No doubt I have lost many friends in this way, and upset many readers. Sigh. Weep. Wail.
It has to be said, though, that readers of my blog have less cause for complaint than those who correspond with me. I am, after all, writing a post now—not an email.
Also see: An earlier post on this predicament.
Posted by Amit Varma on 02 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
... were basically a group blog. No?
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Small thoughts
This piece is the third installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking It Through.
As a blogger, I often get phone calls from journalists who have been instructed to write a story on blogging. Generally, all they know about it is that it is some new kind of buzzword, and they have often not read any blogs. Their questions invariably include the phrase “blogging community.”
Oh how they generalise. “What does the blogging community feel about the new KBC?” they ask, or “What do bloggers write about?” I try to be polite and say that I can only speak for myself, but I won’t deny that the image of hanging a journalist upside down just above a vat of boiling oil gives me great glee at such times.
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Essays and Op-Eds |
India |
Politics |
Thinking it Through
After much delay, let me finally welcome you to India Uncut!
I first discussed the blueprint of this site with MadMan, who has designed and programmed it, in March last year. Immense procrastination ensued, largely on my part, but we finally got round to working on it a couple of months ago. A brief introduction to each of its sections follows below, taken from my detailed note on how this site came to be and what it contains, ”About India Uncut.”
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Posted by Amit Varma on 15 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
The piece below by me appeared on January 19, 2005 in the Indian Express as ”The world according to me”. That headline wasn’t mine, though. I’d also posted it on India Uncut.
Towards the end of December, just after the tsunami struck, I told a journalist friend of mine that I was planning to travel through coastal Tamil Nadu to report on the aftermath of the disaster. “Ah, excellent,” he said, “Which publication you going to write for?”
“I’m not going to write for any publication,” I replied. “I’m going to blog.” He looked at me incredulously.
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Posted by Amit Varma on 15 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Essays and Op-Eds |
Personal
