India Uncut is a popular Indian weblog turned website published by Bastiat prize winner Amit Varma. The original India Uncut began as a blog in December 2004. Amit Varma was then managing editor of Cricinfo, but decided to shift to being a consultant so that he would have more time to do his own writing. Amit's experimentation with a new medium took off and gained more readers than he had anticipated.
Much of Amit's freelance writing, such as Op-Eds for the Wall Street Journal Asia, were elaborations on ideas that were initially explored on the blog.
However, India Uncut was, most of the time, a filter-and-comment blog. Some of its readers often chose coming to India Uncut over reading a morning newspaper, and wanted lots of links. Others hated the one-line link posts, and wanted him to write more.
To evolve the blog, on February 15, 2006 the new India Uncut was created in collaboration with Madhu 'Madman' Menon. It sought to expand the ways in which it can bring pleasure to readers. The new sections were:
Amit Varma had a narrow escape from the November 2008 Mumbai Attacks and his subsequent blog post attracted a substantial amount of hits thereafter. He was even featured on Larry King Live following his close shave.
Amit Varma was also recently named in the Business Week Magazine list of India's 50 most powerful people.
Hachette India launched his first book "My Friend Sancho" in May 2009.