What do you get when an MBA with a career in the financial services industry is tired of the drudgery of corporate life, the horror of office politics, has had it with the rat-race and decides to sit down and write a book? With Amish Tripathi, an IIM graduate, you get three thrilling books that span the realms of mythology, science, politics, philosophy, spirituality and fantasy. Perhaps it is not surprising that in a part of the world where parents steer their children to careers in medicine, engineering or business, the current crop of popular writers in India like Tripathi and Chetan Bhagat are products of business and engineering colleges who have realized their calling lies elsewhere.
The first book in Amish Tripathi's Shiva trilogy, The Immortals of Meluha, opens with a simple postulation: what if Shiva were not a god? What if he were a human who walked the earth thousands of years ago and rose to the calling of his times? What if his actions and deeds as a human being resulted in extraordinary accomplishments? What if the people of that time who witnessed these extraordinary accomplishments perceived them to be divine? Prior to written history, knowledge was passed down orally from one generation to another. In that era, the best way to preserve and perpetuate the story of a leader was to deify him. Tripathi says "Myths are nothing but jumbled memories of a true past. A past buried under mounds of earth and ignorance." In this book, Tripathi tells the story of Shiva, a Tibetan tribal chief who rose to command the respect of an entire civilization through his karma. The book draws on mythology, the Shiva Puran, historical facts and the writer's own thoughts and imagination. The trilogy is an account of the possible events, places and people in Shiva's life that created the legend behind the man.
The narrative is fast paced and captivating. The book opens on the pristine shores of lake Manosarovar in Tibet under the shadow of Mt Kailash. The beauty and serenity of the Himalayas is blighted by the scourge of a perennial war of existence raging on between the tribe of Guna led by Shiva, and their ruthless adversaries, the Pakritis. One day Shiva meets a visiting soldier from Meluha, a land of plenty where people live in peace and prosperity with their neighbors . Meluha is what we now know of as the Indus Valley civilization. It is a place where people live to be in their hundreds because of the Somras, the “elixir of immortality”. The soldier invites Shiva to move to Meluha. Shiva is somewhat tempted by the thought of a life far from the hardships and struggles of the Himalayas but is initially reluctant to forsake the land of his forefathers. A leader in his own country, he would be just an immigrant, a follower, in a new country. After fending off a brutal attack by the Pakritis, Shiva finally throws in the towel and decides to leave behind the savage rivalries of his homeland and move south to Meluha in the hopes of a better life for his people.
Upon entering Meluha, he is administered a potion of Somras and that sets in motion a chain of events that alter the trajectory of his life and the destiny of humankind and immortalize Shiva in Hindu folklore. Shiva embodies the qualities of the prophesied Neelkantha and uses the power of the ancient legend to seek and destroy evil. He carries on his mission firmly rooted in his human antecedents and shuns the idolatry of the faithful.
Tripathi's prose has been criticized as "choppy and sloppy". In the first book, the writer is tightfisted with details but that is more than compensated by, and probably the result of, the fast and engaging flow of the narrative. His delivery gets progressively better in the second book, The Secret of the Nagas and the third and final one, The Oath of the Vayuputras. There are plenty of anachronisms in the books, some of them quite jarring, such as the "anti-oxidant" properties of the Somras to explain it's potency or the thermo-nuclear concepts of fusion and fission to explain the workings of Daivi Astras, Pashupati Astras and Bhramastras.
At a philosophical level, the trilogy dwells on the nature of good and evil. Shiva travels the length and breadth of the land to find and destroy evil. He makes mistakes along the way and learns how easy it is even for the most intelligent of minds to misidentify evil. In the end, human excess is seen as the epitome of evil. Good is the ying, the excess of which creates the yang of evil. The reader is shown how excess prosperity creates suffering. And excess power corruption. Excess freedom anarchy. Excess might self-destruction. You are left to ponder whether excess self-esteem can debilitate you. Or if excess pleasure can create pain? Or excess pride create prejudice. Or excess perfection flaws.
The book is a good read and can entertain and enlighten even the most avowed of atheists such as this reviewer.
Last edited: 06-May-13 01:49 PM