'Highway 39' book launched at Literati

CALANGUTE: The northeast has always been a distant land for the rest of India, its people strangers in their own country. Not much is known about the seven states. In the last few decades, the only time you heard about the northeast was when some guerilla group blew up somebody or the army killed some "insurgents". That even the well-informed know much about the ground realities in the northeast was vividly evident at the Goa release of Sudeep Chakravarti's 'Highway 39', a book about travels on the road known as Highway 39-now NH2-which starts in Assam and passes through Nagaland and Manipur. Human rights activists Nandita Haksar and Sebastian Hongray released the book on Saturday. The book is more of a chronicle of the insurgency which has been going on in the northeast where the indigenous people have been fighting against the Indian army, and a story of the horrors being experienced by everybody there.