The Heat and Dust Project

'We were the usual: nine-to-fivers, investment-makers, mall-goers, office-trippers and city-slickers. We were life-going-to-seeders.'

Living in a sunny barsati in south Delhi, Saurav Jha and Devapriya Roy are your average DINK couple, about to acquire a few EMIs and come of age in the modern consumerist world. Only, they don't. They junk the swivel chairs, gain a couple of backpacks and set out on a transformational journey across India. On a very, very tight budget: five hundred rupees a day for bed and board. And the Heat and Dust project begins. Joining the ranks of firang gap-year kids and Israelis fresh out of compulsory army service, they travel across a land in which five thousand years of Indian history seem to jostle side by side. It is, by turns, holy and hectic, thuggish and comic, amoral and endearing. In buses that hurtle through the darkness of the night and the heat of the day, across thousands of miles, in ever new places, the richness of this crowded palette spills over into their lives. From rooms by the hour to strange dinner invitations, from spectacular forts to raging tantrums, this is a youthful account of wanderlust and whimsy, of eccentric choices that unfold into the journey of a lifetime ... and a supreme test of marriage.

Auteur

Saurav Jha studied economics (and debated politics) at Presidency College, Calcutta, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He dropped out of the PhD programme to do some explorations of his own. He writes and researches on global energy issues and is passionate about clean energy development in Asia. He is currently writing a Tom Clancy-ish techno-thriller, defence and military history being his other great loves. He has started his own energy advisory-Energy India Solutions-based in Delhi and Calcutta.