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Siachen. The world’s highest battlefield. An obscure, unwinable war fought in the mountains far beyond the reach of ordinary men. A parable of India and Pakistan. At the end of 2003, foreign correspondent Myra MacDonald set out to uncover the secrets of this war, on a journey which began in the monkey-infested military headquarters in Delhi, led through the villages of superstitious Indian foot soldiers to the villas of retired generals in Islamabad, and to the war zone itself on both the Indian and Pakistani sides. Heights of Madness is the first account of the Siachen war to be told from both the Indian and the Pakistani points of view. But it is also about the journey itself, of a lone foreign woman travelling through India and Pakistan, meeting larger-than-life characters – the Buddhist hillman, the Sikh hero, the Pathan commander, the Hindu jawan – and stumbling into improbable settings, fighting off altitude sickness in a yak tent, huddling around a bukhari stove in a makeshift officers mess, suffering from sunburn on the world’s highest road. And perhaps most of all, it is about the mountains. For the Siachen war is fought over a land so beautiful that you come to believe, as do many of the soldiers who serve there, that this is indeed the home of the gods.Myra MacDonald has worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters for 20 years, covering France, the European Union, Egypt and India. She was Bureau Chief of Reuters in India in 2000-2003. She then took leave-of-absence to research the Siachen conflict, becoming one of the very few people to visit the war zone on both the Indian and Pakistani sides ISBN - 9788129112927
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Pages : 242
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