Cutting Loose

Amaltas Avenue, Manju Jaidka’s third novel, is set against a backdrop of campus happenings over a period of three days during a sultry Chandigarh summer. The book focuses on a number of characters who share a common milieu, including the eponymous residential neighbourhood, even as they drift through seemingly ordinary lives, playing out mundane everyday roles at an individual level. It is not to be confused with other breezy campus writings as Amaltas Avenue in fact brings to attention more complex issues through its protagonists–often antagonists–when they are confronted by unexpected turmoil in their personal and professional arenas.

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Punjab, long reviled for dusty flatlands and merciless summers, quite marvelously lends itself to splendid driving holidays. Not despite but because of said plains. A well-tended network of national and state highways carves through (mostly) eye-catching landscape and you are never far from this agrarian land’s defining truisms: luxuriant acreage, mustard fields, rows of eucalyptus and poplars, chugging tube-wells, waddling cattle, tractors belting Punjabi pop, haughty mutiaars and strapping ghabroos.

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Remember the two babies I introduced in an earlier post? Well the twin has arrived too – in the guise of Best Escapes North India. Conceptualised differently from previous guides in Lonely Planet Escapes series, this one includes suggested itineraries within the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. A power-packed, all-weather, every-season storehouse of authentic information and fun facts. Time to scramble for your copy. Read more