Amit Varma, the man behind one of India's most successful blogs, talks about the curious case of a crime reporter and a jealous lizard in his debut novel

A journalist-turned-blogger-turned-author doesn't want to be known as any of that, thinks he's poor, and still can't believe his debut cover has a pink heart on it.

Amit Varma, owner of the popular blog India Uncut, walks through IPL fields, Zoozoo zoos and political battlefields on his online outings, but when it comes to paperback, he makes his protagonist take the chhipkali gully.

There is no money in either blogging or writing novels. Do it only for the love of it. No other reason makes sense. Doing either well is hard; doing either badly is easy

His book My Friend Sancho is about a smart-alecky scribe who sets out to write a story on an innocent encounter victim's life through his daughter Muneeza aka Sancho, and ends up changing his own.

Semi-autobiographical, you suspect? Don't dare to compare, warns the gecko geek.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0

Your protagonist is into crime reporting, a profession difficult to decode unless you've been in it yourself. Do you think imagination makes better writers than facts?
Oh, I totally believe that writers should write about what they know. But they don't need to have done it themselves. I've been a journalist, even though I've never worked in a newsroom, so I know what it involves. Furthermore, I did a fair bit of research on how crime reporters function. That's important.