The Wildings

I had never imagined that a novel like The Wildings would come out of India. After seeing shelves after shelves of predictably tragic literary fiction and badly written commercial fiction, I had given up the hope of ever seeing anything this vividly imaginative.  The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy, however, shows me I can be optimistic: not only is it a beautifully produced book, but it also takes on a subject that few ‘serious’ writers in India would dare to explore: the lives of cats.

Yes, Dear Reader, Cats. If you, like me, are crazy about cats no matter how much they ignore you, then this is a book you want to read. And if you don’t like cats, I still think you should read this book, because you just might come to appreciate them and their talents a little more.

OK, the part about the talent needs to be scratched, because this is after all fiction. But how I wish it were true! All those times when I saw my cat sit in balcony and look outside – they make so much more sense now that I have read this book.

But I’m running ahead of myself. You need to know what this book is about. So, The Wildings is about a clan of cats living in the bylanes and ruins of Nizamuddin in Delhi. They live by a strict code of ethics all their own and they are all connected to each other through a strong, invisible web of scent and whisker transmissions. There’s Beraal, a beautiful black-and-white queen who is also a fierce fighter, Miao the wise Siamese who is the clan elder, Katar the strong and brave leader, Hulo the warrior and Southpaw, the curious kitten who can’t help but get into trouble. Other animals make appearances too, such as the deadly and powerful Kirri the mongoose, the brave little mouse Jethro Tail, a pair of squirrels called Aao and Jao and the cheels who rule the skies. Life in Nizamuddin is not luxurious, but it’s good, nonetheless. The cats survive catching prey like mice, rats and bandicoots and often forage through the rich leaving found in the midden heaps of the Bigfeet (humans), most of whom usually leave them alone. They  wander the roofs at night and doze in the cool shade offered by trees.

This serenity is interrupted by the arrival of Mara, an orange kitten with monsoon green eyes. She is what is known as a ‘Sender’ – a cat who can transmit her thoughts to other cats and animals so powerfully that most of them see a projection of her in front of them. A Sender is a rarity, a cat who only appears when times are set to get tough and when the other cats need her the most. And Mara is the most powerful Sender to have ever appeared in Nizamuddin.  A series of extraordinary events follow Mara’s arrival, such as encounters with tigers and a battle for survival against a crazed and bloodthirsty group of feral cats, but it all ends…well, I suppose.

In fact, the end is pretty ambiguous. You think it ends well, but when you really consider it, you can no longer be sure. The attitude of the Bigfeet towards the cats seems to change a little and Mara still has to struggle with her fears and doubts, but there is no immediate threat to the cats’ survival in Nizamuddin. It seems like a happy ending, but I highly doubt it. There’s no end to danger in the lives of street animals and the saga of the cats of Nizamuddin is endlessly fascinating. If Roy ever decides to come out with a sequel, I will be one of the first in line to buy it. Even flipping through the book affords one such pleasure. The illustrations by Prabha Mallya are beautiful and they fit in exactly with how you imagine the characters would look like.

While I loved the book, there were some things that bothered me. One was the names of the cats, such as Southpaw, Abol and Tabol, Qawwali, Affit and Davit. These are human words and I’m not entirely sure how they fit into cat vocabulary, especially since the cats refer to the humans as ‘Bigfeet’. That last detail, then seems like a superficial touch, which exists merely to add a touch of the ‘cute’ to the story.

Nevertheless, this is a book that I will hold on to – the story is worth visiting again and the illustrations, like I said before, take the experience to whole other level.

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com . Participate now to get free books!

Herland: A Dystopian Motherland

Recent paperback edition (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was, for me, one of the more interesting discoveries of the Fantasy & Sci-Fi class in Coursera. I had read Gilman before: her fascinating and highly disturbing short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, to be exact. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do. It’s freely available on Project Gutenberg, as is Herland.

Now, I won’t say that Herland is as accomplished a story as The Yellow Wallpaper. The latter stirs me deeply; it stirs a visceral reaction, which is part horror and part pity. And that’s exactly what its meant to do. It makes us shudder because we see what supposedly ‘benevolent’ subjugation can do to a woman. In Herland, on the other hand, we’re presented with the picture of a world populated only by women. There’s no question of subjugation. Everything runs smoothly and like clockwork and the world is as pretty as a painting. Nevertheless, there are some disturbing aspects to this supposedly ‘perfect’ world, and those are what I chose to write about for my Coursera essay. Read and enjoy!

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book, Herland is presented as a Utopia which is free from disease, corruption, poverty and other vices that mar the rest of human civilization. But is it really the wonderful place that Gilman makes it out to be? Throughout the novel, one finds references to the practice of Eugenics in this nation where women, who are deemed unfit for the task, are prohibited from becoming mothers.

While the basic idea behind this selective motherhood is sound – that only the most capable should ideally be doing a job that comes with so much responsibility – modern democratic sensibilities rebel against it. There’s no denying that a woman’s role goes beyond the bearing and rearing of children, but it is entirely a woman’s prerogative to have children or not. In this matter, Herland citizens behave in a manner that would seem out of place in the kind of ‘Utopia’ that Gilman seems to be describing. After all, the freedom to procreate that we take for granted,  is something that is protected even in the most tyrannical societies. Whether a person is a ‘suitable’ parent is not for the state to judge, unless the child herself is in grave mental and physical danger.

What makes this even more disturbing is that, early in the story, the Herland citizens tell the three visitors that they have ‘bred out’ nuisances like dogs and cattle. Later, we find out that Herland also ‘breeds out’ girls who are seen as posing a danger to the stability of their society.  Would this be allowed to happen in a truly Utopian society?

Just like other stories before it, Herland points towards the dangers of ‘Utopian’ fantasies – whether they are seemingly harmless like Gilman’s or Hitler’s more brutal vision. This may not have been the conclusion that Gilman wished for readers of Herland to draw, but reading the book today does raise these questions.

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Frankenstein’s Anti-Enlightenment Argument

English: Frontispiece to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831 Steel engraving in book 93 x 71 mm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The most boring book I read for the Fantasy & Sci-Fi course was Frankenstein. The protagonist was unsympathetic, there were long passages of exposition and repetitive descriptions, and almost every line of dialogue, even that of a young child, began with the exclamation “Ah!”. It was a very laboured and contrived book and I regretted every moment that I spent on it.

Anyway, I’ve pasted my essay on Frankenstein below. It wasn’t a great effort, but mostly because I hated the book so much that I simply couldn’t bring myself to write about it.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein argues against the main principles of the Age of Enlightenment. In the Age of Enlightenment, which was the primary cultural movement for a greater part of the 18^th century, great value was placed on reason and the advancement of the human race through scientific development. Nature was to be dominated by man, not the other way round.

On reading Frankenstein, one can clearly see that Shelley is highly critical of the Enlightenment movement’s cold, calculated approach towards the world. Anthropocentricism dominated all cultural and intellectual discourse and it was believed that, thanks to science and technology, humans will advance like never before. Shelley explodes this belief by having her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, succumb to the ultimate hubris: he aspires to become the creator of a more ‘perfect’ race of beings. The ambition fails and Frankenstein sees his folly in trying to do nature’s work.

Shelley even frames her main narrative through the voice of another hubristic man, Walton, who wishes to fight against all odds and reach the Arctic: a desolate land, where man cannot hope to battle against the harshness of nature. Fittingly, the novel ends with Walton giving up his ambition and returning home.

While exposing human folly, Shelley also takes every opportunity to extol the sublime beauties of nature. Many passages are filled with Victor’s description of the natural beauties of his homeland and several times in the story, he finds solace in nature.  At one point, he even gives up his scientific studies and pursues literary studies, and finds “relief” and “consolation”.

In the end, Victor obsessively pursues his enemy, all the way to the arctic. Here, both the creator and his creature, meet their ultimate defeat, but not at each other’s hands. It is finally ruthless and relentless nature that kills Victor and renders his enemy without any purpose in life, thus leading to the latter’s suicide.

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Dracula: Triumph of the Masculine

The Vampire Deutsch: Der Vampir (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Long before Stephanie Meyer unleashed the first of the Twilight books on us, I liked Vampires. I’ve written about them on this blog before, and also for a column. No, I wouldn’t befriend one and neither would I sleep with one, but the idea of the Vampire was fascinating. Of course, for a long time Vampires have come to stand for repressed human sexuality; even Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, although physically so repulsive, is quite frankly sexual. You don’t even have to read the book too closely to understand that. Ever since then, most writers have treated Vampires in exactly the same way. They’ve gone from having hairy hands and yellow faces to having golden eyes and gleaming bodies, but throughout, they’ve stayed highly sexualized.

Honestly though, it’s not the sexuality of the Vampire that interests me. What I find fascinating is the idea of a being, existing for centuries with nothing to do. Most of us don’t look at it in this way, I suppose, but death is really a blessing and an escape – as long as it comes at the end of a long and fulfilling life. For Vampires, that particular door is closed, unless an especially brave slayer decides to put them out of their misery.  To me, the beautiful Vampires brought to us by Anne Rice, Meyer and Charlaine Harris are not really objects of desire, but really objects of pity. Anne Rice, actually expressed the existential anguish of Vampires pretty well, even though she herself did play a major role in the current sexualization of Vampires.

Anyway, so when I took the course on Fantasy & Sci-Fi through Coursera, I decided I wouldn’t focus on this ‘sexuality’ in Dracula. It was the most obvious take-away from the story. But I also didn’t understand how I could explain any of the existentialist strands in the novel because, frankly, there aren’t any. The novel is quite purely pulp, and with very little rumination. So I decided to take a radical and rather risky approach – Gender Politics. I’m sure a lot of you already know Dracula is a very gendered novel, full of macho men and swooning women. But again, I didn’t want to repeat the obvious, so I argued for Dracula being a symbol of the feminine. I know, it sounds weird. But read on below, and hopefully, you’ll be convinced.

One of the major themes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the triumph of the masculine over the feminine. This interpretation is not limited to the treatment of the characters. Even though the men – Van Helsing, Seward, Godalming, Morris and Harker – rescue the woman – Mina Harker – from the clutches of another male, Count Dracula, their real triumph is over the feminine forces that he represents.

Dracula was written during the Victorian era, when the feminine was represented as weak and irrational, and requiring the control of the stable and rational masculine. The women, Lucy and Mina, fall victim to Dracula’s magnetism. The more feminine Lucy dies, while Mina, with her “man’s brain”, is rescued by her husband and male friends. It is significant that although Jonathan Harker, a man, does almost fall victim to the three female vampires in Transylvania and is kept prisoner by Dracula, he manages to escape by himself.

However, the male vs. female question in Dracula goes beyond this reading. After the European Renaissance, the scientifically and militarily advanced Occident (Western Europe) was seen as representing the masculine, while the ‘mystical’ and backward Orient (Asia and Eastern Europe) was seen as feminine.  Also note that, magical powers and understanding of the supernatural are usually associated with women.

In the light of these considerations, one sees that Dracula, more than Lucy and Mina, represents the feminine in the story.  He is a supernatural being as well as a native of Eastern Europe.  In contrast, his main antagonists are all Western European males (except Morris, a hyper-masculine American), who defeat Dracula by the ultimate act of male dominance over female: penetration. Of course, Dracula is ‘penetrated’ by a stake through his heart, but the symbolic significance of the manner of his defeat cannot be missed.

Since Dracula is set in an age when the ideal female was passive and home-bound, the defeat of a symbolic ‘female’ like Dracula – who dared to be aggressive and venture beyond his ‘home’ – underlines the Victorian belief in the unchallenged superiority of the masculine.

 

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Curioser & Curioser

Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second essay from the Fantasy & Sci-fi course was on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. When I first read these books, I was quite young and the stories didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I mean, sure, they were wacky and whimsical and the illustrations by John Tenniel were a joy to look at, but I couldn’t understand why everyone made such a fuss about the Alice books and not about other books which I thought were better, such as the Faraway Tree series by Enid Blyton.

However, when I read the book for the course again, I realized that Carroll’s two books are so much better than anything from Enid Blyton’s vast collection. There were many discussions in the Coursera forum about what the books could be talking about, other than an imaginative girl’s adventures in Wonderland, of course. One particularly intriguing theory I came across posited Wonderland as a ‘Womb’, from which Alice emerged as a more mature, thoughtful young girl. Most of the theories, in fact, played with the psycho-sexual implications of the stories, which I thought were interesting, but perhaps a little too obvious, once you’ve read the books more than a couple of times. So I decided to explore an angle that, at least to me, seemed different. You’ll find it below. Do read and let me know if you agree!

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll champions curiosity and easy adaptability. When Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a world where things don’t run the normal way. Despite being occasionally taken by surprise, Alice takes it all in her stride and even manages to preserve her good temper most of the time. This is simply because she is curious, and rather than waste her energy in fighting her peculiar circumstances, she tries to understand and adapt to this new world a little better.

A good example of Alice’s readiness to suspend the rules of her real world comes in the first chapter when she finds herself too small to reach the key lying on top of the table. When she sees a cake lying under the table, she doesn’t know whether it will make her smaller or bigger, but she does immediately understand – thanks to her previous experience in eating and drinking things here – that it will have some effect on her size. She also understands that regardless of what size she eventually gets to, she will be able to get through into the garden. Here she demonstrates her understanding of two important rules of Wonderland. One is that eating something that says ‘Eat me’ is not as stupid as it would be in the real world and may, in fact, offer a solution to her problem. The other is that there is no one right way to do things, unlike the real world where children are taught that there is a right way and a wrong way to approach things.

It is perhaps easier for Alice to question what she has been taught and adapt to new circumstances because she is a child and therefore less set in her ways than an adult. But Carroll’s books teach us that in a rapidly changing world, willingness to adapt and curiosity are great tools for survival.

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Finding My Way Home

I was away from this blog for a VERY long time. I got so busy with my work and the courses that I was taking that I forgot that I needed this space for myself. This blog keeps me sane and is my own special little place and I shouldn’t ignore it, should I?

Anyway, in the months that I was away, I got a full-time job with a social media agency, I completed some pending freelance assignments I had and I finished the Fantasy & Science Fiction course on Coursera. Woohoo! I didn’t do much reading, I must admit, besides whatever was assigned during the course.  But I did write some half-decent essays, which I though would be great to share with you guys. The first one is about The Grimm Brothers‘ Fairy Tales. A lot of the stories were very new to me, such as Cat and Mouse in Partnership, the Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage, Clever Grethel and Foolish Hans. On the other hand, there were others that were familiar, such as The Juniper Tree, Aschenputtel (Cinderella) and Hansel and Grethel. Nevertheless, it was great fun reading the old and the new and even more fun discussing the stories on the forums with the other students.

So anyway, the following is my essay on The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales. I didn’t want to take the typical angle of these actually being stories for adults and not for kids. So I added a little twist by asking exactly why adults told each other these stories. At least, I think it’s a twist. You might disagree. Nevertheless, here’s my essay, for your pleasure (or not).

‘Amorality’ seems to be a feature of many Grimm Fairy Tales. Traditional morals and ethics, such as obedience, hard work, familial love, modesty and loyalty are not rewarded, and are often punished quite cruelly.  What is also interesting is that these stories feature no supernatural or fantastical elements.  The only exception to this is the use of talking or anthropomorphized animals as the protagonists.

There doesn’t seem to be a higher purpose to the stories than simple entertainment; if there are any lessons, they only teach us that life is unfair. For instance, if The Death of the Hen is analysed using the more conventional parameters used to judge fables, then it has no real meaning. A hen reneges on her promise to the cock and dies. But everyone (including the loving cock) who very kindly decides to give her a decent burial also dies at the end of the story. The actual meaning only comes through if one accepts that rather than teaching an ideal, what the story is saying is that it doesn’t matter if we’re good or bad; the end is the same for all of us.

Similarly if Cat and Mouse in Partnership had been written as a moral tale, it would have ended with the cheating cat being taught a lesson. Instead, the innocent and trusting mouse is eaten by the cat. In The Vagabonds, the innkeeper, who allows the animals to stay on his premises, is left cheated and wounded.

We know that most of these stories originated as tales that peasants told each other for amusement, even though the Grimm brothers themselves did not get most of them from that section of society. It is very likely then that the purpose of these stories was not to teach the peasants how to lead better lives, but simply to teach them to accept the harsh realities of their lives.

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Book # 11 The Wednesday Soul by Sorabh Pant

The first thought that entered my brain, as I plunged headlong into The Wednesday Soul by Sorabh Pant, was that this was clearly a tribute to Douglas Adams. Just like that incomparable comic writer, Pant has taken a mighty leap off the edge of the Plausibility Cliff, and has swum, with some success, in the Sea of Improbability. He has, like Adams, created characters with varied shades of quirk in them and has also, like Adams again, shown us that the idea of death (or destruction) has great comic potential.

Unlike the late great Adams, however, Pant is still mastering the art of writing. I’ve watched his stand-up routine a couple of times and I’ve always enjoyed it. Pant has great energy and a wonderful sense of comic timing when he’s on the stage and he brings this to his book as well. However, a stand-up act does not last more than an hour, so the joke-a-second formula works perfectly well in that format. In a book, however, it can get exhausting. There seem to be at least four punchlines in every paragraph and unfortunately, it seems like that is all there is to it.

Another major problem I had with the book was that too many things seemed to be happening together. The action shifts constantly between two different sets of characters and only in the end, is there some semblance of cohesion.  There are LOTS of characters and some of them are genuinely funny, but the problem with having lots of characters – all of whom have something important to contribute to the story – is that sometimes the author simply doesn’t have time to build enough back-story for them, or give them enough depth to make us care. One instance is that of the mysterious Radha N. Recliws, who gives us the introduction to the story, then disappears for most of the book except to give us bits of information at the beginning of every chapter. He only reappears right at the end.  Now, this Recliws is an intriguing character – you’ll know when you read the book – but his reappearance is abrupt, and consequently, seems very tacked on. Remember how bewildered you were when Gandalf the Grey suddenly reappears as Gandalf the White in The Two Towers?  At least in that instance Tolkein had built up the story enough to make us care that Gandalf had returned to the narrative. In The Wednesday Soul, there’s no such build-up.  It’s just action, action, action.

But you probably want to know what the plot is, so here it is in a few words: Nyra Dubey, is an vigilante who is suddenly killed by a bus. She’s furious because she had finally managed to get herself a boyfriend, and now all she can think of is how she can get back to him. Unfortunately, the afterlife is pretty much like real life, in that whatever you want to do is not as important as what the powers-that-be want you to do. Nyra is constantly thwarted by red tapism. She also finds out that sinister plans are afoot, which may throw the whole balance or life/after-life off-kilter.

So what is it about the book that works? As I said at the beginning, The Wednesday Soul shows great imagination.  Pant has created his own version of the afterlife with some truly brilliant concepts like the categorization of souls. He’s also introduced celebrated people – fictitious and non-fictitious, including Marie Curie, Agatha Christie and Guru Dutt – as minor characters.

Reading this book proved more difficult than I had expected, and in all fairness, I must admit that most of the time, it wasn’t Pant’s fault. What really lets the book down is the shoddy editing: there are quite a few spelling errors, and the breaks traditionally used to separate scenes are often missing.  Since the book has a fairly complicated plot, such errors on the part of the editors is unforgivable.

The book seems to have been generally well-received and there’s already talk of a sequel.  I would congratulate Pant on the success of his first novel, but I would also warn him to take a little more time with his next one. Perhaps that will make it easier to read, and also funnier.

Book #10 Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Regular readers of this blog are aware of my fondness for Truman Capote’s work. I can’t say it enough: the man was a literary genius. He spun sentences with such skill and deftness that one couldn’t possibly improve upon them. His prose is the most effective example I’ve read of painting pictures with words. Sample this description of a nameless Alabama place:

“…this is lonesome country; and here in the swamplike hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man’s head, there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses; often the only movement on the landscape is winter smoke winding out the chimney of some sorry-looking farmhouse, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling over the black deserted pinewoods.”

This is from the opening paragraph of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote’s first published novel. It tells us the story of 12 year old Joel Knox, who sets off from New Orleans after the death of his mother, to go and live with his father at Skully’s Landing, in Alabama. His father had abandoned him at birth and this would be the first time that two are meeting.  Only, other people, who are not his father, await little Joel as he arrives at the decaying mansion: the sullen, jittery stepmother Amy, the narcissistic and flamboyant Cousin Randolph, the paranoid servant Zoo who dreams of escaping to Washington DC and her grandfather Jesus Fever. Joel doesn’t meet his father until halfway through the book, and then he discovers that the father he had hoped would support him, needs taking care of himself. Edward R. Sansom, Joel’s father, is now paralyzed and cannot communicate with anyone except by rolling a red ball on the floor to get their attention.

It’s clear that Joel has arrived in a place where all that’s left is ruin and broken dreams.  This is where the significance of the passage that I quoted becomes clear. It sets the tone for the rest of the book: that “lonesome country” with its “dark marsh water” and “black deserted pinewoods” prepares us to enter a landscape that reflects the deep melancholy that will mark Joel’s new life. His father is an invalid, his stepmother is peculiar and Randolph wears his depression and dissipation like a cloak. It’s a strange place and the only person who manages to enliven life for Joel is the local tomboy, Idabel Thompkins.  Idabel, who develops a bit of a crush on our forlorn hero, is wild, loud and prickly. Not exactly hug and kiss material,as Joel finds out, much to his dismay. But she is the only bright spot on the horizon for him; she offers him a chance to escape the dull misery of life at Skully’s Landing and Joel grabs at it, only to find out that it’s not so easy to let go of one life and start a new one.

Truman Capote , 1948 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Despite the way Joel gets sucked back into life at Skully’s Landing, the novel is also about renewals and rebirth. More specifically, it’s about accepting oneself and one’s circumstances, as Joel does at the end of the novel. One popular interpretation of the novel has it that it’s a ‘coming-out’ story: in the final scene, when Joel goes to join the mysterious lady in the window (who we now know is Randolph in drag), he’s finally accepting, and celebrating, his own homosexuality – just like a young Capote once did.

In fact, most readers agree that Joel was just a stand-in for Capote himself, since the novel has strong auto-biographical elements. Like Joel, Capote was a lonely little boy who barely knew his parents and was raised mostly by relative. In fact, Capote himself admitted that the major theme of the novel was a son’s search for his father.

To me, however, it seems like Other Voices, Other Rooms is about finding love and acceptance in the most forbidding of places. Joel finds out that he does belong in Skully’s Landing, after all, and that there are people here who care about him.  He is no longer a poor little orphan boy, but a mature young man now, who is confident enough in himself to let his guard down finally and let people get close to him. We realize that the difficult part for Joel was not finding love, but to let himself be loved.  The most forbidding place, then, was Joel’s own heart. And once he found acceptance for himself there, he found acceptance elsewhere.

Book #9 Marathon Baba by Girish Kohli

Title: Marathon Baba

Author: Girish Kohli

Publishers: Fingerprint!

Price: Rs 150

 

As I flipped through the pages of Marathon Baba the very first time, I was distinctly dissatisfied. On the back cover flap, the author, Girish Kohli was described as having been born “on the day when a dog in the US was put on trial and executed for barking too much”. Girish, it went on to say, “hasn’t passed out of the IITs or the IIMs. He doesn’t have a day job either. If you wish to speak to him, you will not find him either on Facebook or Twitter. He drives a jeep without a spare tyre and is the author of two unpublished novels. Marathon Baba, his third book which has been published first, is the only book in the world based on a pair of unused running shoes”.

What put me off about this author bio was that it used the tired old trick of using humour on the back flap. It felt a bit too much. I mean, I know this is a funny book, but when I read an author bio, I’m looking for actual information.  Information about his social networking or lack thereof is not going to help me understand his work better.

At this point, I must confess that when the book arrived from the publishers, I was in a very cranky mood. I had just read another ‘humour’ book: an endless, tiresome bore of a book with too many words and too little wit. So naturally, I looked on another ‘humour’ book – complete with a funny author bio – with ill-concealed loathing.

Turns out, it was a good thing. Because I was expecting so little enjoyment from Marathon Baba, it hit me with quite a wallop when I realized that I was racing through it and enjoying it immensely. Sometimes people like me need that wallop. It keeps us from becoming overbearing cynics and turning to one-note bores.

Now, if you’re one of those who view the boom in Indian publishing with sinking hearts, be of good cheer. There is at least Marathon Baba, which you can read and actually enjoy.  The book is written with a frantic pace which reflects its main concept: that a man can keep running away from his troubles and still find salvation. No, really! It’s the opposite of everything we’ve read in Paulo Coelho books.

The plot in a few short sentences: Boy Karna grows up in bad home. Mom and Dad fight. Boy runs away for the first time.  After that, he runs away from other problems like girl who broke his heart and a dead-end job.  He finds that he can’t stop running. That’s his salvation, his peace. He finds a magical pair of sneakers which go on to be a major point of contention in the novel.  Karna ends up founding the Marathon Ashram which becomes a refuge to all those who are running from something or the other.  He refuses to be religious and refuses to be political and that, ultimately, may be his downfall.

A deeply cynical vein runs through Marathon Baba and it is not afraid to poke at Modern India’s holy cows. Corporate jobs, the idea of success, the ubiquity of politics and religion, worship of celebrity and our desperate need for someone, anyone to lead us – all of these are skilfully skewered by Kohli. There’s no denying that the prose tends to be a little uneven, but there’s great energy in this book. It’s almost as if it was written under the influence of the kind of drugs that Marathon Baba sells to fund his ashram.

Marathon Baba is not a very heavy book and it won’t take too much of your time. Don’t hesitate to pick this up if you’re looking for a story that will breathlessly take you right till the end and will make you laugh as well.

Book # 8 The Forest of Stories by Ashok K Banker

The frame story for the epic Mahabharata is the 'Snake Sacrifice' of King Janamejaya

It’s funny how little one really knows or recalls about the stories one grew up hearing. Like most Indian kids, my favourite bedtime stories used to be from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which my grandmother would narrate to me every night at bedtime. When I was a little older, I would watch the television adaptations of these stories every Sunday and when I started to read, Amar Chitra Katha’s comic book versions kept me entertained. The thing that struck me the most, even at that young age, was how these stories never got old. They remained constantly fascinating and endlessly repeatable. There was always something fresh, some new connection that one hadn’t quite understood the last time, or a new perspective through which one viewed these ancient stories.

But here’s the thing: so few of us actually revisit these stories as often as they deserve. The problem seems to be that they become such a part of our lives as Indians, so very familiar, that we never feel the need to read them again. No matter what religion you personally profess, if you grow up in this country, you know all about Rama, Sita, Ravana, Krishna, Arjuna and all the rest from the wide and colourful cast of these two epics. And so, you may end up thinking that there is nothing new to learn from them.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps some of you re-read the stories when you grew up a little. I didn’t. I always meant to, though. I would look at the thick, beautifully bound volumes of the epics in bookstores and would tell myself that I simply must read them again. But I never did, because there are so many other stories that I still haven’t read, and am I not already so familiar with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata?

Turns out, I’m not as familiar with them as I thought. For instance, whenever I thought of the Mahabharata, I always had this vague idea that the story was about the fratricidal war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and the politics behind it all. But there is so much more to it! There are hundreds of characters, each with his or her fascinating back story and motivation. So many little incidents that happen generations before the actual war actually make that event inevitable.

So what happened, that I’m thinking all this now, was that I received a copy of Ashok K. Banker’s The Forest of Stories from the good people over at Westland. It is the first instalment in Banker’s retelling of the Mahabharata. He calls it his MBA series, but don’t assume that the stories have been mangled by modernity. These are straight retellings. As Banker explains in the introduction, he sat with the various versions of the Mahabharata and put together a coherent version for the modern reader. It must have been a gargantuan task because although the Mahabharata does not have as many versions as the Ramayana does, it is nevertheless a massively complex work.

Banker sticks pretty faithfully to what we know as Vyasa’s Mahabharata, which was actually framed as a story within a story within a story. To put it simply, there’s Vyasa’s original epic poem Jaya (with 8,800 shlokas), which tells the story of the great fratricidal war of the Kuru clan and features Vyasa himself as one of the characters. This is expanded into the Bharata, comprising 24,000 shlokas and narrating the history of the Bharata race itself. Eventually, the number of shlokas went up to 100,000 shlokas and the epic came to be known as the Mahabharta. It was narrated by Vyasa (also called Krishna Dweipayana or ‘Dark Islander’) at the 12-year-long snake sacrifice ritual conducted by King Janamejaya who is descended from the Kuru line. The story of this narration as well as that of the snake sacrifice and why Janamejaya is doing it, is being told to the inhabitants of the ashram Naimisha-sharanya by the storyteller, Ugrasrava Sauti.

I know it sounds complex, and I assure you that it is. But it’s such wonderful reading! If anything, I find myself more drawn towards these little framing stories than to the story of the war itself. One particular section, the one that talks about the origin of snakes and how they’ve come to acquire the evil reputation they possess is alone worth the price of the book, in my opinion.

Don’t expect to dive into the core story straight away when you start reading this book. It wanders around and takes its own time to arrive. And yes, I know that you know where the story is going and that you might think there are no surprises to be had along the way. But when you read this book you understand more deeply than ever the truth behind Ursula K Le Guin’s words, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end”.  What you’ll enjoy, when you read this book, will be the stories about the Nagas, Shakuntala and Dushyanta, Garuda and the churning of the ocean. As you read the subsequent books, you will get to the heart of the conflict between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, but in the meantime, the journey to that point will keep you fascinated.

Related articles

• The forest of stories: A review (thatandthisinmumbai.wordpress.com)
• Sequel to Mahabharata Begins With A Nuclear Explosion (bhagavatambybraja.wordpress.com)
• Was Mahabharat War Justified? (bellepost.wordpress.com)
• Mahabharat War- the circular firing squad! (bellepost.wordpress.com)