Countdown (Paperback)

Summary of the Book
Amitav Ghosh chronicles his journeys and conversations with several hundreds of people of the subcontinent. The Indian government tested five nuclear devices about forty kilometres from Pokhran. Pakistan tested its own devices after seventeen days. Three months after these tests, the author goes to the Pokhran area, and then to Kashmir as a part of the defence minister’s entourage. He also visits Siachen where Indian soldiers have been fighting Pakistani attacks for more than three decades. Amitav Ghosh also travels to Pakistan and Nepal, the experiences of which is partly constitute the content of this book.

About Amitav Ghosh
The Indian-born English writer Amitav Ghosh’s work mostly constitutes historical situations, specifically Indian at that. He is from West Bengal. His debut novel was The Circle of Reason, and he has ever since been a prolific writer. Born in July 1956, Ghosh studied in some of the most reputed educational institutions of India. He later acquired a D.Phil. from St. Edmund Hall in social anthropology. He was also a professor and taught at Queens College, City University of New York, and Harvard. For his outstanding contributions to literature, Amitav Ghosh has been awarded the Padma Shri award by the Indian government in the year 2007. He has also won the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Dan David Prize, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for his book Sea of Poppies. Some of his other notable works are The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, and The Hungry Tide.