Balochistan at a Crossroads

Description

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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Willem Marx grew up in the UK, studied Classics at Oxford University, before graduating from New York University with an MA in Journalism. He has travelled on assignment to more than 40 countries in five continents, and his writing has been published by Harpers Magazine,The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Prospect and The Atlantic Monthly. He has also worked as a television journalist at ABC News, Al Jazeera English and CBS News, and is currently a correspondent for Bloomberg TV based out of New York. Marc Wattrelot grew up in Paris, France where he attended the Sorbonne University and Sciences Po Toulouse. There he studied Geography, Politcal Science and Journalism. His photographic work in Balochistan won the Anthropographia Honorary Mention and has been exhibited at the New York Photo festival, the Forum for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Gijon Photojournalism Festival in Spain and in Paris. Marc was based in New Delhi for three years where he worked as a journalist for several French television channels. He is now based in Beirut with his family and works as a documentary filmmaker throughout the Arab world.

ABOUT THE BOOK
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Balochistan at a Crossroads is a captivating account of Willem Marx’s travels in Balochistan. He recounts his adventures here as he goes into the backcountry to conduct some exclusive interviews. He confesses that although his travels were exhausting and sometimes very dangerous, the country’s landscape was endlessly beautiful in its emptiness. The list of people he had to interview contained the name of one of Iran’s most wanted terrorists and a ragtag militant organisation, living in the isolated mountain valleys, which was aligned against the mighty Pakistani Army. He traversed broken and almost invisible trucking routes through the desert at night in order to complete the interviews. The history, topography and people of Balochistan enthralled the author and his photojournalist friend Marc Wattrelot, who managed to capture spectacularly emotive scenes, which have gone unseen by most casual visitors to this less-known corner of this world. The author feels that Balochistan is reminiscent of a charming past, but when he met the people, he realised it is the future to which they were all looking at, often with apprehension.