For a page-turning introduction to contemporary India, you’ll want to stay up all night reading The Poison Earrings. Sidd Burth’s crisp and humorous prose is as admirable as it is pleasurable to read. Burth covered seventy thousand kilometres by car on a quest to rediscover the soul of his country. This story is set in the tea-growing region of the country's scenic north east, California and Paris. It interweaves social turmoil into the lives of its central characters and thus turns it into an inside view of an unknown region while looking at the devastating effect of insurgency on a once peaceful society. Five talented friends- founders of a rock group, one of them is bisexual, another not quite sure about anything, after finishing their happy teenhood, escape with life to build their futures elsewhere only to meet with terrible consequences. It offers a sensitive account of cultural clashes...