Readomania is excited to announce the acquisition of the worldwide publishing rights to Sabir Hussain’s travelogue, titled Into the East. The book is expected to hit the stores in 2022.
In the winter of 2018, the 53-year-old journalist throws caution to the wind and sets off on his journey on a borrowed Royal Enfield Himalayan motorcycle to reclaim his life from the monotony of a desk job in New Delhi and to retrace his roots.
The ride that begins in Siliguri in north Bengal takes him through Sikkim, the Darjeeling hills, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, and Nagaland along some of the most perilous and picturesque roads in the country.
Many of the places on his route are just dots on the map but they have their own charm that leaves him with priceless takeaways from the once-in-a-lifetime trip. Among these places is Tezu in Arunachal Pradesh where he is amazed to see a lottery that offers mithuns (large bovine in the eastern Himalayas), pigs, goats, and chicken as prizes.
By the time his journey ends, it turns into a kaleidoscopic account of the Northeast, its flavour, beauty, history, geopolitics, and its people that make the region such a vibrant place. Into the East is a cracker of a road trip to some of India’s most challenging, beautiful, and historical destinations which will fire anybody’s dream of going on an overland adventure to the Northeast.
Hussain says, 'I was born in Assam and spent the first 25 years of my life there before I moved to Delhi in 1990. Things haven’t changed much since then as far as the opinion of the rest of the country and North Indians in particular, about the Northeast and its people is concerned. The Northeast is mostly viewed through a prism that paints it as unstable and often a dangerous place to visit for a variety of reasons. Much of the population is considered alien for their physical features, food habits, and way of life. The reality is very different. And so when I rode 7000 km across seven states in about 50 days I thought I owed it to myself to write about my experience to dispel many of those misconceptions. Into the East, which will soon be published, is also about a dream that I had chased relentlessly until I lived it.'
Sabir Hussain has been a journalist for over three decades and now makes a living as a freelance journalist and editor. He has worked with some of India’s top media houses and news agencies like Press Trust of India, Times Now, India Today, and most recently with the Hindustan Times. Outside the newsrooms, he is an adventurer at heart and has been a part of several motorcycle expeditions to Ladakh between 1998 and 2008 as a member of a Delhi-based bikers’ club called Pathfinders. His first book, Battlefields & Paradise, published by Westland in 2016, was a motorcycle travelogue that he wrote after riding solo through Kashmir to India’s northernmost place called Turtuk on the edge of Ladakh along the Line of Control with Pakistan.
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