Friday, August 20, 2010

Step 3 - Is this the start?

Things have started moving. The pace seems fine.. at times little quick. Hope everything goes well cause I'm putting all the other plans on hold until it settles.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Immortals of Meluha

My latest read - The Immortals of Meluha by Amish.

This is the story of Shiva, a tribal warrior who rises to become Mahadev - Lord Shiva.
The premise is that all the deities we worship today were actually humans centuries-millennia ago. Humans who have been bestowed with that God like respect from people out of their deeds. Over centuries, the stories of these mortals have been treated with due imagination and fiction making them immortals and Gods we worship today.
I always believed in the same theory as well.

Meluha is the land we all know as The Indus Valley and Meluhans, The Indus Valley Civilization. So the narration was set in the timeline between 3500 - 2000 BC. Meluha was the kingdom built by Lord Ram with all his ideals of a perfect society - a society governed by strict law. The kingdom of Meluha was existing for about more than a thousand years at the time the story begins. So essentially, the story is happening 1000 years after Lord Ram created Meluha. Meluhans were all followers of Sun and hence called Suryavanshees.
As the plot requires, there is a territory called Swadweep, which was the land of Chandravanshees - followers of the Moon. There was rivalry between the civilizations from time immemorial and Ram was worshiped in Swadweep as well.

The legend runs among the Meluhans and the Swadweepans that a Neelkanth - man with blue throat will one day emerge and destroy all evil. Each of the societies out of their ignorance of the principles of the other society believe that the other one was the evil one.
It is at this time that a tribal warrior chief Shiva comes to Meluha as an immigrant and is discovered to be the Neelkanth. It is now the expectation that as per the prophecy that Neelkanth will help the Meluhans end the evils of Swadweepans who have formed dangerous alliances with vile foreigners.

The story which follows is the story of how Shiva turns into Mahadev - weds Parvati or Sati in the story - and  discovers that his conception of what evil is - is completely wrong and that he had already been the cause of the deaths of thousands of innocent Swadweepans in the war he declares on Swadweep while fighting for the Meluhans.

The book is unputdownable like any other book once you started reading. However, I could not understand why the author chose that particular timeline to narrate the story in. Shiva was born and is recognized as a God 1000 years after the time of Lord Rama in the narration. But isn't this flawed when every one knows out of the epic Ramayan that Lord Shiva was already a God when the story of Ramayan begins. Ravana the Asura was said to have been a great devotee of Lord Shiva. Wasn't it Lord Shiva's great bow that Ram breaks at the swayamvar to win Sita.
The narration was at times not reflecting the age - there were parts of the narration in direct speech which lost the mythical feeling - vastly.

This book is to be followed by two more to form The Shiva Trilogy. I'm sure to buy the next one when it comes out.