Book Review: Sikandar

When I finished reading the novel ‘Sikandar’ the past week, little did I know that it was something prophetic. Originally written in Bengali by Binayak Banerjee and translated into English by Soma Ghosh, it chronicles a reality show called 'sikandar' modeled on the same lines of Bigg boss (yes, with that stupid extra G). Being an ardent hater of all kinds of 'reality' shows, I was reluctant to read this. But then, lines of praise like 'remarkable insight into the depths of human existence where passing personalities engage in a life and death existential struggle to attain one's true human destiny' on the blurb, made me read this. And by the end, I was disappointed!

Coming back to the prophecy, I was quite surprised yesterday when Sami Agnivesh announced that he is going to enter bigg boss. My first reaction was- ‘this must be the hangover from that book’. Because, one of the ten contestants in the ‘sikandar’ reality show is ‘Swami Samyuktanand’, an ascetic like Agnivesh. I guess Agnivesh must have got this book through the ‘book reviews’ program and took it to heart.  Like the character, Agnivesh seems to have plans to preach at the wrong place. This comment from him yesterday is a primer for what to expect from him- "The girls inside the house don't seem to have any social responsibility.  I want to make them realize just how many girl children are killed in the womb and how many women are burnt alive in the name of sati”.

Enough of Agnivesh’s ramblings. The first problem with the book is that it confuses you right from the introduction.  The introduction throws at you a set of ten highly confusing Bengali names and their brief background. By the time you are done with it, you will be highly disoriented and you will have to keep on going back to these introductions to make sense of who is what and which, unless you are related to these people. Talking about relations, another funny thing is that all of the ten contestants are related or rather know each other in one way or the other. Some had shared fights. Some had shared beds. Some had shared stages. And it is an eclectic mix of characters- actor, industrialist, former revolutionary, prostitute etc.

I read this one right after I finished Jose Saramago’s classic ‘Blindness’, which also handles a similar, but REAL situation. There also, a group of people are quarantined in a building after a mysterious contagious blindness grips a place. It chronicles the change in their behavioural patterns, captures their quirks and builds it up into a larger picture of how humans react in peculiar situations, with the use of sublime prose peppered with philosophical overtones. In ‘Sikandar’ also, the author seems to have similar intentions, but the ‘pearls of philosophy’ from every other character looks out of place at several passages. Having said that, I did like certain sections and certain characters, most notably Rangajoba Sanyal, the ex-revolutionary who is in the show to get enough money to cure her daughter’s cancer.  But, most of the characters are half developed, especially the ones who are eliminated from the show in the earlier stages itself.

By the time I finished the book, I had only this to say- “So?” I kept on reading the book expecting for something to ‘happen’. There were too many loose ends and many things which were not explained. Having recently done a project on translations and the problems associated with it, I have a feeling that some things were actually ‘lost in translation’. How I wish I has some Bengali knowledge! But then, I don’t want to read another novel on ‘reality shows’, which are anything but REAL!

On a serious note, Swami Agnivesh’s big boss news comes as a disappointment. After his recent pivotal role as the Govt’s mediator with the Maoists and that epic NDTV show in which he silenced Barkha Dutt, this was something that he could’ve avoided.

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Book Review: The Shiva Trilogy

The Immortals of Meluha

My only reason for picking up 'The immortals of Meluha' was the eyeball grabber of a cover. Well, it required something like that to catch my attention, simply because this was not my kind of reading. To be frank, I was taken aback a bit at first. A pot smoking Shiva uttering words like 'Dammit', came in as a surprise. Maybe, what I liked in the book was also the same- a shiva who was more of a human than a mythical God, a Shiva with all the confusions and oddities in behaviour that are characteristic of humans. And then, a whole 'nauseatingly perfect' community of people pinning all their hopes of redemption on the arrival of a blue-throated man from a foreign land. It works well, being the page turner that the book is, setting the context, fixing the geography and ethcing the characters for the next parts of the trilogy.

 The Secret of the Nagas

Secret of Nagas takes off right where the first book left off, landing you in the middle of some serious action. Amish then proceeds to redefine the true meaning of evil. A heartening thing about the trilogy till now is that the author has avoided the typical 'black & white' picturisation of good and evil, the way it was done in many of our old texts. Most of us have grown up reading the simplified versions of the epics, with the likes of Raavana and Duryodhana seen as personifications of evil. Visual adaptations of these epics also follow the same line. There is no scope for the good qualities that they possessed. And all of it remains unknown to us, until we read those alternative texts, which are not that popular.

The Shiva trilogy, though not anywhere near in stature or content when compared to those alternative texts, triumphs in not giving us any clear cut demarcations of good or evil. Just when you decide in your mind that "here comes the bad guy!", the story turns on its head revealing a completely new side of the 'bad guy'. There is goodness and God in everyone. At the same time, no one is a complete paragon of virtue. Even Shiva is not infallible. Even he is prone to uncontrolled and misdirected anger. In the first part, you are led to believe that Meluhans are the perfect race except for aberrations like the 'vikarma tradition'. Then slowly, you get to see the problems that come with such insane levels of perfection. Then you see the creativity of the unorganised Chandravanshis and you are suddenly thinking from an entirely different angle.

Shiva's is unsurprisingly the most well etched character in the book. The next one is perhaps Parvateshwar, the Meluhan general and the true follower of Lord Ram. The way he reacts to Shiva, his unquestioning devotion to Meluhan and Lord Ram's principles and then his slow transformation to seeing Shiva as his Lord, are well crafted. And to be honest, I liked Anandmayi's character more than Sati's in the second book. Have to agree that part of it is due to the oozing sexiness. I feel that except Sati, most other characters weren't expanded as much as they deserved to be.  And Bappiraj, was that a nod to the king of bling?

Though I didn’t find both of the books as worth all the hype, it did set me thinking on larger questions of history and how we see it. In an ‘arts and culture’ class in college last month, the lecturer was telling us how history is anything but the truth. To make this point clear, he gave us the simple analogy of how the things that happened in that class will get misreported to someone who didn’t attend the class, and how this will be subject to further misinterpretation as it is passed on to the next one. If such a simple thing is prone to so many errors in reporting within the span of a day, how believable are our historic texts, which are written by some random guy from another century! That realization helped me in seeing this series of twisted history through a new light. Forgot to add, the Naga cover ROCKS!

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