The Spines of the Mahabharata Books

I had lent the first volume of the Mahabharata translation by Dr. Bibek Debroy to someone I know. I got it back last evening. This completed my collection - I had, for the first time in almost a year, all six volumes published so far. Of course, this is not strictly accurate, because a year ago there were only four volumes that had been published, but you get the picture. And if not, I have a picture below.

After I got Vol.1 the first thing I did was to line them up, slightly askew, and take a couple of photos with my trusty, four-year old camera. Why did I do that? Mention the camera? I don't know. Why did I say I placed the books slightly askew? Ah, that! That is for a reason. These volumes have an almost identical layout and cover. All six volumes so far have followed the same template - the cover has no text on it, only a series of symbols associated with the epic and war - a sign of the sun, a flag ("ध्वज "), a fish, arrows, a lotus, swords, an elephant, and so on. Each volume has a different color - the first volume is a dark shade of red, while the sixth volume is a pale bluish-green.

The spine is the most interesting part of the cover, in my opinion. Apart from the fact that it has the book's title and author, which is not the interesting or exciting part, each volume has a single symbol on its spine. The first volume (my review) has an illustration  of snakes tumbling into a fire. This is the imagery of the "sarpa-satra", or snake sacrifice in the Adi Parva that King Janmajeya organized to avenge his father's death at the hands of Takshaka, the serpent king. The second volume (my review) has the "chausar", the board for the game of dice, laid out, and a few dice ("paasa") strewn about. This - the game of dice - occurs in the "Sabha Parva", where the Kauravas, led by their wily uncle Shakuni, invite the Pandavas for a game of dice. The game of dice resulted in the Pandavas losing everything, including their wife Draupadi, to the Kauravas, and set in motion a chain of events that would culminate more than thirteen years later, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Volume 3 (my review) looks somewhat difficult to decipher, but is quite straightforward if you look at it closely. This volume has a couple of earrings and an armour plate on its spine. These two, of course, are the "kavacha" and "kundala" of Karna, that he was born wearing, and which made him invincible in battle. And which Indra, the divine father of Arjuna, wanted to take away from Karna so as to ensure his son's victory. Knowing that Karna would never refuse anything if asked after his morning prayers, Indra approached Karna in the guise of a brahmana. The rest is history, so to say.

Volumes 1-6 of The Mahabharata, translated by Bibek Debroy

Volume 4 (my review) is a genuinely tough one for the casual Mahabharata reader. The spine feature a bunch of cows. This imagery is of the stealing of King Virata's cows by the Kauravas. The Pandavas had spent the thirteenth year of their exile living incognito in the palace of King Virata. After Bheema, living as Ballabha the cook, had bludgeoned Keechaka, the powerhouse commander of King Virata's army, to death for trying to molest Draupadi, Duryodhana suspected that this deed could have been performed by none other than Bheema. He used the pretext of stealing King Virata's cows to try and smoke out the Pandavas from hiding - which would ensure they would have to go to exile for a further thirteen years. The spine of volume five (my review -1, 2) needs no introduction. It is Arjuna's chariot, with Krishna as the charioteer. Arjuna is standing with the bow in his right hand, meant to emphasize Arjuna's ambidexterity ("savyasachi"). It is also the only volume so far with a person, and two at that, on the spine. The sixth volume, (my review - 1, 2, 3) has a spiral - the chakra vyuha formation - on its spine. The chakra vyuha was the formation that Drona, the Kaurava commander, put in place on the fateful thirteenth day of the war. With Arjuna away fighting the Samshaptakas, it was left to his son, the sixteen year old Abhimanyu, to penetrate the formation. With Jayadratha, at the vyuha's entrance, holding off the four Pandavas, the lone Abhimanyu was done to death by six brave Kaurava warriors who followed Drona and Shakuni's advice on how to disarm the young prince.

The seventh volume will feature the death of Karna - the third commander of the Kaurava army, the battle between Duryodhana and Bheema, and the midnight destruction of the Pandava army by Ashwatthama. If a stuck chariot wheel makes it to the spine, then Karna, in an indirect way, would have made it to the spine of this series twice.

     

 © 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Mahabharata, Episode 2

When Ganga seems ready to drown the eighth son too, Shantanu can bear no more, and he breaks his promise, and stops Ganga. He saves the eighth son, but loses both Ganga and their eighth son, Devavrata. Ganga recounts two stories, and two curses. One is the story of their divinity, fall, and their reason behind a human birth. The other is the story of the eight sons. They were eight vasus, and were cursed by Sage Vashishta, for stealing his cow, to be born on earth. While seven of them could escape a long life on earth through the grace of Ganga, the eighth vasu's sin was more severe than the others, and thus was cursed to live a long life on earth. While Shantanu waited for the return of his son, he chanced upon Kripa and Kripi, two abandoned siblings, and entrusted them to the care of the royal sage. One day, Ganga returns, and returns Devavrata to Shantanu. Shantanu takes his now young son into his charge. The second episode ends wtih Devavrata taking a horse for a ride, and coming face to face with the Shalva King, bent upon annexing Hastinapura.

 © 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Mahabharata, Episode 1

Where do yo begin the Mahabharata from? Where do you start? Do you start with the snake sacrifice (सर्प सत्र) ? And what do you do if you are making a television serial of the epic? And what happens if you also want to inject a subtext of political probity, even if the powers that be may see it as less than politically acceptable - of having the king be told that he is a प्रतिनिधि, not a नीतिपति, or that even royal succession has to be on the basis of merit, and not birth? This is not explicit in the epic, but notable is the fact that such a message was only somewhat unpalatable in the 1980s, but would be seen as a direct, full-frontal assault on the royal, imported dynasty in India today.

So, talking about beginnings, what about starting with King Bharata, son of King Dushyanta and Queen Shakuntala, who appointed not one of his sons as his successor, but instead chose someone else as his heir, and thus set perhaps the first precedent of democracy? Would that be a stretch? What if this beginning, the sapling that King Bharata planted, would be uprooted several generations later, during King Shantanu's reign? Such is the beginning of the Mahabharata that BR Chopra's epic serialization of the panch-veda chooses - a tale with time, समय , as the sutradhar, सूत्रधार| King Shantanu is besotted with the river goddess Ganga, and the two marry. But here is a condition. A condition that is the first of several conditions that will dot the epic, and each condition an attempt to control fate, a futile, human attempt. Ganga imposes a condition on Shantanu - that he will not question her, no matter what she does. Shantanu agrees. Ganga tests him, repeatedly, and most cruelly so, by drowning their first born son, and then the second born, and then the third, and so on... Shantanu can only watch.

 © 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Most Popular Posts of 2012

As per statistics provided by Google Analytics, for the year 2012, these were the most popular posts on my blog. Eight of the top twenty one posts were related to the Mahabharata. The most popular one was actually a photo post on the Mahabharata Panorama at the Gita Museum in Kurukshetra. How apt. Of the Mahabharata related posts, two more were photo posts from the city of Kurukshetra, one on the Gita chariot at the Brahma Sarovar, and other one on Bheeshma Kund. The rest of the Mahabharata related posts were my reviews of Bibek Debroy's ongoing translation of the epic - four of the five volumes that I wrote reviews on in 2012 feature in the list.
There were two other book review posts that made it to the top 21: both excellent books, India's Culture and India's Future, by Michel Danino, and Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl - both have such a great relevance and timeliness for India that I cannot recommend them enough. Mara Hvistendahl, the author of Unnatural Selection, was kind enough to respond appreciately to my tweet of the review, which is the biggest reason it got as many page views as it did.

Here is the list, ordered by number of page views, in descending order.

1. Mahabharata Panorama at Kurukshetra
2. About
3. Notable Books
4. All Books Reviewed
5. Mahabharata, Vol.5, by Bibek Debroy
6. Notable Photos
7. Mahabharata, Vol.1, by Bibek Debroy
8. India's Culture and India's Future, by Michel Danino
9. Unnatural Selection, Mara Hvistendahl
10. Mahabharata, Vol.2, by Bibek Debroy
11. UB City Mall, Bangalore
12. Gita Chariot at Kurukshetra
13. Page on Mahabharata
14. On the Road to Dalhousie
15. Mahabharata, Vol.3, by Bibek Debroy
16. Bheeshma Kund, Kurukshetra
17. Terminal 3 at the Delhi Airport
18. Books from Flipkart
19. Bandipur and Mudumalai National Parks
20. Travel Map
21. Brihadeeswara Temple, Thanjavur

© 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Mahabharata, Vol. 6 - The Battle at Night

The Battle at Night

Mahabharata, Vol. 6. Translated by Bibek Debroy
(Part 1 of the review, also see A Note on the Footnotes)

(Amazon US, Kindle US Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, Kindle UK, Amazon UK)

I used to think that the 18-day war of Kurukshetra was a very sanitized affair, an impression only made stronger after watching B.R. Chopra's television epic on the epic. And I must admit here that I am a big, big fan of BR Chopra's TV series. However, I watched silk-clothed warriors aim arrows that killed soldiers from afar and who returned to their camps with nary a drop of blood or gore or signs of grievous injury on them. Several retellings of the epic also did little to dispel the myth that the 18-day war was an antiseptic carnage.

Mahabharata Vol.6 - A Note on the Footnotes

A Note on the Footnotes

Mahabharata, Vol. 6. Translated by Bibek Debroy
(see my review here)
(Amazon US, Kindle US Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, Kindle UK, Amazon UK)

To say that I like **this** particular series among the translations of the Mahabharata would not be wholly accurate, since this is only the first complete translation of the Mahabharata that I am reading, though I have read excerpts from Kisari Mohan Ganguly and am also reading Ashok Banker's Forest of Stories, part one in a dramatized retelling of the Mahabharata. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Bibek Debroy's series are the footnotes that appear on almost every page. In some cases they serve to identify characters in the narration that may not be apparent because of the use of pronouns in the shlokas. For instance, where the translation states, "He was severely wounded...", the footnote clarifies this to be "Dhrishtadyumna". To refer to the person by name may not be accurate, since the Critical Edition's text may itself be using the pronoun, and therefore to substitute it for the proper name would not be, err, proper.

In other cases, when a word in the translation appears as "rakshasas", a footnote clarifies that the "The text uses the word kshanadachara, which means a walker of the night."

Mahabharata, Vol. 6 - Translated by Bibek Debroy

The Incredible Savagery of War, to Restore & Uphold Dharma

Mahabharata, Vol. 6. Translated by Bibek Debroy
(Amazon US, Kindle US Flipkart, Flipkart e-book, Kindle UK, Amazon UK, my review on Amazon)

The sixth installment of Bibek Debroy's translation of the unabridged Mahabharata, based on the Critical Edition by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, (my review of Vols 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) features perhaps the fiercest fighting in the 18-day war, as well as a descent into an all-out, no-holds barred bloodfest with no rules left unbroken. Many warriors ganging up against one. Beheading an unarmed warrior who had given up his arms, twice. Fighting at night. The wanton killing of warriors retreating. The killing of warriors who had laid down their arms. Abuses. Much more, and much worse takes place in these three days of the 18-day war that this book covers. Specifically, this book covers days thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen of the war, and contains six sub-Parvas (Upa Parvas): Abhimanyu-Vadha Parva (67), Pratijnya Parva (68), Jayadratha-Vadha Parva (69, and at 210 pages, also the longest in this book), Ghatotakacha-Vadha Parva (70, and 120 pages long), Drona-Vadha Parva (71), and Narayana-Astra Moksha Parva (72).

Enterprise Analytics - Review

"Lectures, Meanders, Pontificates, But Does Not Educate"

"Enterprise Analytics: Optimize Performance, Process, and Decisions Through Big Data (FT Press Operations Management)", Thomas H. Davenport, et al.

(Amazon, My Amazon review, Kindle US, Amazon UK, Kindle UK, Flipkart)

Or, how a book on Big Data, Enterprise Analytics, and technology can neatly skirt any meaningful discussion of Big Data, Enterprise Analytics, and technology.

While a few chapters stand out for their reasoning and clarity, what is jarringly absent from this book is any meaningful, technical discussion about Big Data itself. Without such a discussion, most of the book's content can be recycled with minimum effort ten years from now and applied to the next big thing in technology. Even assuming that this book is targeted at decision makers and so-called C-level executives, an absence of the nuances and complexities of Big Data mean that executives will be as clueless on that dimension of Big Data knowledge after reading the book as before. If you are responsible for selling sausages, you had jolly well get a look at the sausage factory, if not work there a day.

Notable books of 2012

I wrote a post, Review of Reviews in 2012, listing some of the books I read in 2012, and also the whole experience of writing reviews at the pace of one a week. In this post, I will call out what I consider as the best books I read in the year about to go by. These are in the order that I reviewed them in 2012. I had thought this list would comprise twenty books, and with much planning and figurative pats on the literal back I started tweeting this list. As I came to the last book I reviewed this year, I realized I had goofed up with the Twitter posts, and ended with 19 books. Need to go back and correct that.

1. The year started out with a review of the very, very fine "India's Culture and India's Future, by Michael Danino". Not only is it written in an easy going, engaging manner, it is also very well organized, and gives all the hyperbole one has come to expect from books that talk in a positive light about India. The book is short enough to be read in one sitting, and it is a pity it has not found a wider audience.
Flipkart.com, Amazon.com

2.While Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" was also a look at the origins and some of the players in the makings of the financial meltdown of 2008, his latest book, "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis", is a travelogue, a disaster tourism travelogue if you will, among countries as they cope with the aftermath of the financial meltdown - and it's not a pretty picture that stares us in the face. Lewis' wit and tombstone humour alleviates what could have been an otherwise a very dirge of a tale.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart

 3. I forget how, but somehow, somewhere, I learned of an ongoing translation of the Mahabharata - the whole nine yards, mind you, and in this case this would be the whole 80,000 shlokas that form the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata - by economist Dr. Bibek Debroy. I bought the first two volumes (there's a story there too - I ordered the second volume, then realized my mistake, and I could not find a way to cancel that order, and therefore ended up ordering the first volume too). I read them every night till I had finished both, and then was on to the third and fourth volumes. For someone with the gumption to persevere, I believe this is the most approachable translation yet of the entire Mahabharata. It avoids the faux-archaic usage of words like "thee", "thine", "thou", which I have always found to grate on my palate - even when encountered in a Shakespeare play, yes! Short footnotes every now and then help clarify some points. Six volumes have been published thus far, taking us to near the end of the Kurukshetra war, and a further six are planned, including Hari Vamsa and some stories from the epic that have been excised from the Critical Edition. These six volumes are also available as Amazon Kindle e-book editions, so  you can now carry an epic on a phone.
Vol.1, Vol.2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4, Vol.5 (1, 2)


4. Perhaps the only way one can tell the history of the subcontinent, or a country in it, like Pakistan, without completely going insane with frustration, is by taking refuge in humour. In "The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power", author Tariq Ali does just that, and the result is an unputdownable mix of information and at times rib-tickling humour, laced with the pickling acid of sarcasm.
Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, Junglee, This Ya That, IndiaPlaza

5. How much do we lie? When do we lie? What about when people are looking, and what about when we can get clean away with cheating? "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves, by Dan Ariely" uses results from real-life experiments run by the author and collaborators and others to look at these very pertinent issues. In some ways this book is also somewhat of a sequel to his earlier book, "The Upside of Irrationality", which covered similar ground, but only in passing.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, my user review on Amazon

6. The skewed gender ratio in much of the developing world, especially India, has been the focus of much hand wringing. "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl" is a simply amazing book on the issue, and uncovers causes you would not have thought of - like colonialism, that instituted so-called land reforms that excluded women from inheriting property, or western institutions and governments that equated a burgeoning population with an increased threat of communism. It forces you to think about the skewed gender ratio in a more informed light. Possibly the best book I read in 2012.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, BookAdda, Landmark, ThisYaThat, Powell's, My review on Amazon


7. This book - "The Parliamentary System, by Arun Shourie" - is as much about 1975, the year India lost her Fundamental Rights for a year and a half, as it is about 2011 and 2012, that saw India battle an increasingly autocratic government and a spate of corruption scandals. Arun Shourie walks us through debates in Parliament that preceded the passing of  amendments to the Constitution, meant to help one and only one individual - Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister, and the uncivil statements made during the course of those farcical debates.
Flipkart, Amazon, Rupa & co, my review on Amazon

8. The only thing more heretical than writing a book trashing Mother Teresa's reputation has to be to write a glowing review of the book. Christopher Hitchens has penned a short polemic, a takedown of sorts, of Mother Teresa, in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Read it as much for the use of the English language as for its sarcasm laden wit against the Mother.
Amazon, Flipkart, Kindle, my review on Amazon


9. I found "After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam, by Lesley Hazleton" to be a short and eminently readable introduction to the origins of the Shia - Sunni split in Islam. While the book gets overly melodramatic at places, it is still a stirring and moving account, especially of the adopted son Ali, and that of his son, Hussain. It doesn't quite explain why the Shias and Sunnis should have developed an all-encompassing, visceral hatred of each other as they did, but it provides some pointers for sure.
Kindle, Amazon, Flipkart, my review on Amazon


10. The whole genre of mythological fiction has left me untouched, and the first in this series that I read was proof that this was a genre best left alone. Then Dr. Bibek Debroy recommended I try "Bali and the Ocean of Milk, by Nilanjan P Choudhury", and I did. After reading this book I could not understand why this book did not receive more attention than it did, and why this book was not a blockbuster bestseller. I suspect people went for looks - the looks of the cover - and they found it confusing. The cover hints at a story that is wholly different from what it actually was. I hope the author writes another book; the genre deserves more books such as this.
Flipkart, Amazon, my review on Amazon

11. Islamophobia is a term thrown about fast and easy against anyone who writes about the dangers of Islamic fanaticism. Such is the case in India for sure. "Londonistan, By Melanie Phillips" deserves a careful read. It deserves attention and its context is valid even more so in India. There is a tinge of the extreme in the author's book, to be sure, but you have to filter that out. If you do, what is left should be food for thought for everyone. The author brings together several strands of thought, including anti-Zionism, liberal philosophy, judicial activism, and more, to argue that a systemic bias against Judeo-Christian ethos pervades British society. Strong words.
Amazon, Flipkart, Kindle, Powell's

12. Why yet another Ramayana translation? Well, how about an abridged translation, from a scholar who brings empathy and wisdom to the translation? "Valmiki's Ramayana", Translated by Arshia Sattar renewed the epic for me, and also, for the first time, brought me closer to the Baroda Critical Edition. It is however not a soulless abridgment - it has an emotional and devotional core that is preserved in this translation.
Amazon, Flipkart, my review on Amazon

13. Why do vaccines scare us? And why do people feed on that fear using pseudo-science, quackery, fear-mongering, to put the lives of millions of children at risk? Without remorse. With a fanatical passion that is resistant to facts and reason. "Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All", by Paul Offit is a fact-laden takedown of the anti-vaccine cult, and is written in a mostly approachable manner for the  lay reader.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Powell's, My review on Amazon

14. "Time Stops at Shamli, by Ruskin Bond" is the kind of book you would want to read just about anywhere, anyplace. The title story is perhaps the best, while the others are also very, very readable. Some are as short as two pages, while most are four to five pages long. There is a near-total absence of overwrought phrases or adjectives dripping with desperate exertions.
Amazon, Flipkart, my review on Amazon

15. What use are children if they cannot be sold to, if useless baubles advertised to them. And what use is childhood if one cannot profit from it. "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture", by Peggy Orenstein is a useful and well-written book on the topic of commercial exploitation of children.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Powell's, my review on Amazon


16. As time goes by, as one gets older, wiser perhaps, appreciation for the Peanutes series and the genius of Charles M Schulz only increases. "Good Ol Charlie Brown, How I Hate Him!" is the first book in the very ambitious project to publish every single Peanuts comic strip, and the evolution of Charlie Brown, his angst, his insecurities are all there for us to see. Truly a great comic strip.
Amazon, Flipkart, Powells, my review on Amazon

17. What happens when you yearn for intellectual acknowledgment, but lack the insights to contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the impact of technology? "The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov" documents these foibles of putting technology front-and-center - "technology centrism", of trying to seek false equivalence between political and social movements more than two decades ago.

18. Certainly one of the more anticipated books of the year, "How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough" is certainly a good read, but at times accounts of the persons seem to suffocate the underlying message and information that needs to stay on top. Adverse experiences in childhood, too protective a childhood, a lack of focus - all can affect our chances of success, of happiness in life.
Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Powell's, Publisher, review on Amazon

19. One of the most anticipated books in India in 2012, "Durbar, by Tavleen Singh" is a journalist's retelling of a pivotal 25 year period in India's history, from the imposition of Emergency in 1975 to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The underlying thread that runs through the book is not only the insidious reach of a select clique answerable to no one, but also the hand of Rajiv Gandhi in so many decisions that went bad, and the results of which are still being suffered by this nation.
Kindle, my review on Amazon,

20. There are only so many ways you can retell the Mahabharata. So I thought. Then came "Adi Parva - Churning of the Ocean, by Amruta Patil", which is a spectacular graphic retelling of the epic. To be accurate, it is only part of the first parva of the epic, the Adi Parva, and is the first in a planned trilogy. Also, it is much more graphics, illustrations than words. And this works just very well with the book. The drawings, color as well as charcoal black-and-white, evoke certain feelings, moods, and invite you to gaze and ponder at the illustrations, adding to the words and drawings what your imagination brings to the pictures. If you like this book, I venture you will return to this book several times. At Rs 799, it is not cheap, but this is a lavishly produced work of art. As for the price - there are always online comparison sites to look for discounts and bargains.
Amazon, Flipkart, my review on Amazon

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Review of Reviews in 2012

2012 turned out to be a fecund year, for both reading and writing reviews. A goal that came to mind only in the closing months of the year - to write 52 reviews, one for each week of the year - was accomplished, albeit with some effort and a little bit of cheating - some of the books I reviewed were children's books, and some less than thirty pages long. But a review is a review is a review. I don't expect every year to be so fertile, either in terms of reading, or writing reviews - a book a week is a pace difficult to maintain. Even this year, some of the reviews actually took more time to write than it took to read the entire book itself! Surely an admission of incompetence on my part. But, if I were to say a couple of things in my defence - rereading several portions of the book when writing a review only made me appreciate those books more, and secondly, I am not a professional reviewer, nor a full-time reviewer. The philosophy behind writing reviews was to keep my reading honest - if I could not write a review of the book that I liked, then most likely I had not paid enough attention while reading the book. The negative reviews were the ones that took more time to write, and more attention, because the burden was that much greater when criticising than when praising. Weekend nights were the most obvious time when these reviews were written, which was good in a way, because it kept me away from the television and the fake outrage of compromised journalists interspersed with the coldly calculative attempts of advertisers at making me feel inferior so I would go out and buy their wares. So, on to a review of the reviews in the year that was.

To say 2012 was an epic year for me as far as reading goes would be to abuse a pun, especially if you consider that I got started on reading a translation of the epic, Mahabharata, in its unabridged form. I read five volumes (I, II, III, IV, V) of Bibek Debroy's translation of the Mahabharata, and as the year ends, I look forward to the sixth volume. I was hooked with the first volume itself, and the tale only got better with the subsequent volumes. A stupendous effort - the translated work - that requires inestimable energy and patience. There were several other books on Hindu mythology that I read along the way, including 7 Secrets of Vishnu, by Devdutt Pattanaik. Bali and the Ocean of Milk, by Nilanjan P Choudhury was an exceptionally well-written and well-crafted book that deserved far greater attention and success than it actually got. Prince of Ayodhya, by Ashok Banker is a fine start to the Ramayana if you are looking for a modern, highly dramatized retelling of the epic. Valmiki's Ramayana, Translated by Arshia Sattar however is the book to read if you are interested in an abridged translation of the Critical Edition of the Ramayana. The last review, the 52nd, that I wrote, is of Adi Parva - Churning of the Ocean, by Amruta Patil, an absolutely stupendous graphic retelling of the Mahabharata. 2012 was evidently a year when I read several books on India - religious, mythological, and otherwise, and the very first I reviewed, India's Culture and India's Future, by Michael Danino, deserves to be read by every Indian, or, as I said - by the confused Indian and the misinformed rest.

Although After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam, by Lesley Hazleton drips with overwrought sentimentality at points, it is nonetheless a short and compelling read on the Shia-Sunni split in Islam. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, by Christopher Hitchens was a heretical read, in a manner of speaking - an expose of sorts of the Mother herself. Londonistan, By Melanie Phillips, on the other hand, is a passionate and at times shrill cry against the author's perceived radicalization of the city of London. Ignore some of the hyperbole and the book makes for disturbing reading. Again, it has an Indian context that Indians would do well to not ignore. As the state of India careened towards a total lack of governance and chaos, lurching from one scandal to another, The Parliamentary System, by Arun Shourie was an eloquent reminder of the adage, "history repeats itself - first as a tragedy, then as a farce." Durbar, by Tavleen Singh took the reader through a specific period in Indian history - 1975 to 1991, and the increasing clout of the courtiers of the royal family of India - the Gandhis, and their and their masters' role in almost every single blunder in that period. Across the border, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, by Tariq Ali provided a caustic account of the foibles of the country's - Pakistan - leaders, both political and military.

As the Internet and social media invade our private and personal lives more and more, I was glad that I read at least two excellent books on the topic: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, by Eli Pariser and The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. The standout in this category remains The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, that I read in 2011. There are at least three more on my reading list, but I am most likely not going to get to them in the remaining five days of this year.

Both Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, by Mara Hvistendahl and Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul Offit were illuminating reads, "Unnatural Selection" in particular leaves you disturbed at the callous manner in which both Western and Indian governments came to advocate female foeticide, call it sex-selective abortions if you will, as a means of population control. "Deadly Choices" should be read by, or read out, to everyone who thinks that there is any alternative to vaccination in protecting our children from preventable and fatal diseases. How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough on the other hand gives a short if somewhat light on details take on what it is that children need and what they need to avoid to succeed in life.

Lastly, the year was not all about serious, non-fiction, or mythological reading. Apart from several children's books that I read, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard Atwater, Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep, by Maureen Wright, Will Hillenbrand, The Paper Bag Princess, by Robert N. Munsch, Good Ol Charlie Brown, How I Hate Him! , by Charles M Schulz are some that I could heartily recommend, The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho  was a good though somewhat overrated book. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson is a classic, while the much known The Camel Club, by David Baldacci is good, till the climax, when it sort of falls apart. John Grisham made a return to form with The Litigators, and The Reversal, by Michael Connelly provided a slight change from his usual thrillers. Some of the short stories in Time Stops at Shamli, by Ruskin Bond are a delight to read, and the title story is perhaps one of the best I have read in a long, long time.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Adi Parva, by Amruta Patil

Adi Parva - Churning of the Ocean, via Amruta Patil

A spectacular graphic retelling of the Mahabharata. This first in a trilogy will leave you spellbound.
(Amazon, Flipkart, my review on Amazon)

If you want to retell the Mahabharata, and want it to stand out from the thousands of retellings over the thousands of years, you have only a few choices. After all, most of what could be said has been said about the epic. However, it is also undeniable that each generation needs a retelling, an adaptation, an interpretation, that it can call its own. You can do a complete translation from the Sanskrit original (from the Critical Edition i.e., since no one really knows what the original is), as is being done by Bibek Debroy for instance. It is is a notable effort, but takes several years to complete, and severely limits the audience, leaving only those few with the gumption to wait and wade through more than six thousand pages of text. The work of a young Samhita Arni stands out for different reasons - the author was not even ten years old when she started writing her interpretation of the epic. 

Adi Parva, by ("via") Amruta Patil is a standout addition to the retellings of the epic, for several reasons. This lavishly produced high quality edition is a marvelous work, for several reasons. This is a graphic book, with the emphasis being more on the drawings than on the text. Each page has at most a two-three lines of text, which leaves you with a full page of charcoal or color illustrations to gaze at.

"It would take several curses ... to bring Karn down on the battlefield."

This story of the Mahabharata comes to us via Amruta Patil, who calls herself the reteller, the sutradhaar. The story itself has its own sutradhaar, Ganga, the river, the goddess. Where and when the sutradhaar makes her appearance in the story, it serves two purposes. One, to provide commentary, insight, a break - if you will, from the story itself. Lurking in the shadows in these charcoal drawings is the second sutradhaar - the cursed Ashwatthama - who will step up, I presume, in the second volume of this retelling. The second purpose of these interregnums is to provide a segue of sorts into a side-story, and there are several the dot the landscape of the epic. Some seem entirely unrelated to the epic, while some serve to add their own raison d'etre to what surely must be a severe case of hyper-causality to several events in the epic.

The snake sacrifice of Janmajeya is one such example. A snake sacrifice to sacrifice all snakes, to get one snake - Takshaka. The cause of this sacrifice is a son's need to avenge his father's murder. The cause of this sacrifice is a mother's anger at, and subsequent curse, of her sons. Ultimately, the sacrifice is as much a reason to avenge Parikshit's death as it is to re-introduce history to a people who had forgotten their own past, and were on their way to repeating it.

"Neither intent nor sacrifices is enough any more, a heavy rope of ritual must yoke the mind and body together."

If you were to take the text in the book, it would probably add up to no more than perhaps thirty pages. Thirty pages out of the story's 250 pages. Which places a heavy burden on the drawings. They are not all drawn in the same style, or from the same palette. Each looks and feels similar and yet very different - and they are sometimes deliberately vague. The vagueness of the drawings evokes a certain mood, and elicits a different emotional response from the reader. Whether it is the blazing red background when Kadru curses her serpent sons, the magnificent black-and-white rendering of Dhruva the pole star, the transformation from full-color to a grayscale palette as Gandhari wears her blindfold for the first time, or Indra's Pearls (Indrajaal) - each pulls you in, to spend time gazing and wondering.
The text serves as a path, while the drawings is the scenery as you walk the path - you are rewarded if you spend some time to take in the scenery as you walk the epic.

A doubly difficult challenge in a book such as this is to find on the one hand, a new narrative even as you must stay true to the story, and on the other hand to retain a consistency, quality and coherence in the illustrations. In the drawings you must avoid the temptation to introduce faux novelty for the sake of breaking the tedium and boredom that could arise from more of the same. Balancing and succeeding requires two different skills, and therefore to succeed at both is a no small feat.

The book ends with Pandu's end, and with Kunti ready to re-enter Hastinapura.

The author acknowledges several debts in this work - including that of her brother, Devdutt Pattanaik, and whose influence can be seen in some places in the book, and of Bibek Debroy, who has thus far brought out six of the planned twelve volumes of the unabridged Mahabharata.

Is this book for children? Will children want to read this book? Should children read this book? These are three different, but related, questions. The answer to the first and third questions is a qualified "no", while the answer to the second question is an unqualified "yes". Let me put it this way - if no more than five or six pages were to be edited or reworded and redrawn, the answer to all three questions would become an unqualified "yes". As a translator of the Mahabharata, unabridged or edited, you do not have the leeway or license to excise the more adult-themed material from the epic. As a reteller, a sutradhaar, it becomes your choice. I can only hope a second edition of this spectacular book will see the author consider making some changes, and therefore opening this epic to the world of children to read it a very new light.

amrutapatil.blogspot.com
http://harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=3522

ISBN: 9789350294161
Cover Price: Rs. 799.00
Format: 232 x 155 mm/Hardback
Extent: 276  pages
Category: Fiction/Graphic

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep, by Maureen Wright

Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep!, by Maureen Wright, Will Hillenbrand
Sleep, Sweep, Jeep - It's All the Same!

(my review on Amazon)

This is a short tale of a big bear's attempts to follow his friend's, Old Man Winter, advice to go to sleep. Winter is approaching, and our big bear needs to sleep. However, if the big bear is hard of hearing, the results can be different, and hilarious. The book is gorgeously illustrated, and when read out to kids, will evoke squeals of laughter from them. The e-book Kindle version is of high quality - the illustrations show no signs of pixellation on a tablet, and if you pinch to zoom on the text, it pops out out, making it easier to read. The story itself is not the point of this book, if one were to choose to crib over the non-existent plot. It is a picture book at its heart, and as such the illustrations are marvelous. The rhyming sentences add a cadence to the story.

A nice book for children to cozy up to. Enjoyable when read out aloud to them, enjoyable for children to see and try and read on their own too.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Indianomix, by Vivek Dehjejia, Rupa Subramaniya

Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India by Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya
A Good Freakonomics-Style Book on India Will Have to Wait

(Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Amazon UK, Kindle UK, Flipkart
My review on Amazon, Indianomix – Wait for the Movie! : Centre Right India)

The trend, the craze, the fashion, that Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist sparked makes it way to an Indian context with this book, but the effects are less than spectacular. A plethora of problems mar what could have been an otherwise successful pop-economics-and-behavioral-psychology book.

Applying economics and blending it with research gleamed from the still nascent field of behavioral economics - in itself a blend of behavioral psychology and economics - to everyday topics can yield fascinating insights that do a better job of explaining how people behave than traditional models that rely on the mythical "rational economic person". It would be an understatement to make the case that we need different, and more rational, models of behavior in the Indian context. As India changes - socially, economically, and politically - providing models of human behavior, in both individual and collective contexts, can help everyone better understand, explain, and perhaps correct undesirable orthodoxy in though.

This book attempts to do just that, but is stymied by several, several factors. When explaining economic concepts, it tends to fall over in talking down to the reader. There is a plethora of phrases like "what economists call a...", "economists are used to ..." - liable to give the reader the impression that he is not supposed to be intelligent enough to know these concepts. When introducing behavioral economics, it sprays basic concepts all over the book, making it very, very difficult for someone who has not already some knowledge of the topic to truly grasp the profoundness of the work of people like Kahnemann and Tversky. When applying these models to Indian problems and behaviors, the arguments put forth are never quite fully fleshed out. Some explanations are simply dropped midway, abruptly. Some are never carried to some logical conclusion. And some are plain wrong. Add to this prose that at times leaves you gasping for semantic clarity, and the result is a miasma of confusion and a picture that never reveals itself.

The section where the book is at its best is when it treads territory pertaining to failures arising out of depletion of cognitive resources. This is a topic that has been covered in other books like "Switch", where willpower is compared to a muscle, albeit a mental muscle. This means that the effort required to suppress our impulses - like resisting a chocolate pie when dieting, can themselves tax and tire our cognitive resources to the extent that we can end up lowering our guard in other areas.
This is of great value when trying to understand why poor, very poor people, indulge in impulse decisions that are very costly. The cognitive restraint required to resists temptations, so very constant and so very tempting, is much greater for the poor than it is for the better off.

"They found that the farmers scored noticeably better after the harvest than before. In other words, their cognitive failures and biases were more pronounced when they were more constrained (and poorer) than when they were less so."

Let us look at some examples of the problems I found with and in the book. Take the example of the QWERTY keyboard and its very sticky ubiquity, despite the so many obvious inefficiencies with its design and the availability, for decades now, of demonstrably better alternatives.

"It turns out that this is what worked best on a typewriter given the position of the metal keys as they struck the paper, not for the ease of the typist,"

Now, this is not strictly correct. The reason that the QWERTY layout was designed was to reduce the incidence of these typewriters jamming. This was especially true of the cheaper typewriters, not so much an issue with the more expensive, and better quality, typewriters. And if you are talking about the QWERTY keyboard, you have to talk about the most popular, relatively speaking, alternative - the DVORAK keyboard - to understand why the QWERTY keyboard has remained to persistently popular. Which the book does not.

One of the cognitive biases that we humans suffer from is "the law of small numbers" - our haste in drawing conclusions from very few observations. The book talks about the probability of getting four heads in a row and how it is fallacious to assume on that basis that the coin is biased - because the chances of a fair coin landing heads four times in succession are 6.25% - not impossibly low by any means. To generalize from randomness is not good. But the example is uninteresting. It's plain boring. As a contrast, look at Leonard Mlodinow's "The Drunkard's Walk", where he writes, "...mathematician George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 10 (to the power 1000007) zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros. " That does arrest your attention, doesn't it? A million consecutive zeroes is NOT evidence of a biased coin, or a non-random process? Math can amaze us. Even this brilliant Dibert cartoon on randomness brings out the point in a more memorable way than the book's example.

When talking of the differences between autocracies and democracies, the book touches on the topic of the skewed sex-ratio in India being partly the result of the easy and cheap availability to ultrasound machines. These machines made it easy to tell the gender of the foetus, with lethal consequences for the unborn female child. What they fail to mention, and it is incredibly germane to a discussion that includes behavioral economics, is that the government of India actually encouraged the use of these machines and the resulting sex-selective abortions as a means of population control. "Nudges" from the government had unintended consequences. Mara Hvistendahl's excellent book "Unnatural Selection" covers this in some detail, and describes a young doctor's harrowing experience of watching a dog make off with an aborted foetus at the country's most prestigious hospital, AIIMS.

Another potential pitfall with the book is its over-reliance on sole experts. When talking about road safety and accidents, their sole Indian expert in this field seems to be Dinesh Mohan. Nor could they find a psephologist other than Yogendra Yadav, who - while possessing the requisite sartorial skills required of an intellectual, also sports a very sombre and serious beard - it should be noted, is a regular fixture on a cable news channel that has had repeated problems with lapses of ethics and objectivity. When the credibility of an argument is seen to rest on solitary experts, the edifice is on a shaky foundation.

A book that encourages the reader to ask questions is a good thing. But questions about the quality of arguments presented tend to undermine the credibility of the book itself. When such questions start popping up on almost every single page, on almost every single topic, I, as the reader, had to make a serious call on what exactly would the returns on the investment in my time be. After going through approximately two-thirds of the book, I had to stop.

Let me add three more issues I found with the book, and I will stop at that.

The book's intellectual credibility takes a deep, deep dive when it veers into colonialism, and whether it was good or bad for India. One of their premises is that it is difficult to do a strict apples-to-apples comparison in several situations. The issue of the efficacy of seat-belts is one such topic that they cover and the difficulty of doing a credible assessment of its success without having a "credible counter-factual" history to compare with. In simple language, it means having a time machine and running some very interesting "Back to the Future" style experiments. The authors do note that where it is somewhat possible to do such a comparison, albeit on a very isolated and perhaps non-representative manner, between regions under direct British rule and between those under the rule of princely states, the results do suggest that "the regions that were under direct British rule have higher rates of poverty and infant mortality into the present day." Fair enough. But, in the interests of being even-handed, they let loose this thermonuclear of a controversial statement - "But does this tell us that British rule caused India’s economic stagnation, and the country would have prospered otherwise? There’s no way to tell, unless we come up with a plausible and credible counterfactual history."
I am sorry - no, I am not, actually - but this is a complete "Are you effing kidding me?!" I will not say much other than to refer them to Madhushree Mukherjee's excellent book, "Churchill's Secret War", and my equally magnificent review of the book (note the non-self-deprecating sarcasm here).

The authors describe the unfounded optimism that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, exhibited towards an increasingly hostile China's aggressive gestures in words and deeds. They quote Pt. Nehru's confession, "With great candour and self-awareness" that "he’d been living in a dream world before the war broke out." They then question whether the great man had suffered from cognitive failures? Yes, perhaps so. But wouldn't it be also reasonable to mention that several people, and not just Vallabhai Patel (not "Sardar" Patel, mind you), had in the decade preceding India's military humiliation warned Panditji, and repeatedly? Arun Shourie's "Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again" uses Panditji's own words and correspondence to document his repeated blindness to the inevitability of coming events. Is it not possible that Panditji did not want India to be militarily prepared because doing so would have contradicted his self-image in the world as an international man of peace? Isn't that a more believable explanation of Panditji's cognitive failings? Whether or not one agrees with it, it certainly merits an inclusion in a book that is supposed to teach us how to think about events like economists?
As an aside, note that noted security expert Brahma Chellaney writes that the Chinese chose their time of attack to coincide with the preoccupation of the West with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire on November 20, 1962. The USA ended its blockade of Cuba on November 20, 1962. Coincidental? Diabolically Chanakyan?

The book, when talking about random events, dwells a bit on Sonia Gandhi's entry and rise in politics. They write, and I quote:

"Even after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on May 21, 1991, she declined to jump into the fray and stayed out of politics for the next decade and a half. It wasn’t until the Congress’s unexpected victory that we’ve talked about, in 2004, that she stepped into public life as the head of the UPA."

Are they serious? Are they serious???
Firstly, a decade and a half from 1991 would take us to 2006, not 2004. Sonia Gandhi had stepped into public life long before 2004.
Sonia Gandhi became the leader of the Congress party in 1998.
She contested elections to the Lok Sabha in 1999.
Even the events surrounding her accession as the leader of the Congress Party is a story most unedifying.
If these were not indications of her "stepping into public life", I wonder what else would qualify.
Perhaps Tavleen Singh's "Durbar" may help them shed light on why she chose not to enter politics in 1991. Journalist Kanchan Gupta also may have some informed opinion to share on the amount of political influence Sonia Gandhi wielded in the years before 1997/8 also.

Writing good English is difficult. Which is why good writers are rare. Good writers in the sciences are even rarer. Which is why an Atul Gawande (read "Better" and "Complications" to know what I am talking about) is so admired. One reason Freakonomics was as big a blockbuster bestseller as it was had to do with its language. Sample this somewhat risque passage from the book:

"The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. ... As for demand? Let's just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice-versa."

In this book, however, you come across instances where you have to think - surely these gaffes could have been avoided. At times the text gets just stops flowing, and gets mired in the prepositional quicksands of grammar, like in the sentence below.

"... if you're not en route to where he needs to go to hand off to the next driver,"

Or you don't know if you are going or you need to 'comma'.

"She was in Cambridge not at the fabled university but taking English language classes at a private college."

Or when the literal collides with slang, and you're not quite sure what to make of the resulting, err, loaf of a sentence.

"What was once a bread basket has become a basket case."

In conclusion, I have to admit to at least a little bit of guilt when writing this review. It's not quite glowing. It's harsh. I am not paid to write reviews, good or bad, scathing or adulatory. I understand the effort it takes to put together a book, especially when it's not someone's full-time job. To then have someone, a blogger, a non-entity, rip it to pieces is harsh. This is one reason I spend more time on the negative reviews - to put forth my point of view that does not make it seem like an armchair pronouncement. In the final analysis, a review is a very subjective pronouncement on a book, biased by the reader's own views, knowledge, cognitive blindspots, and so many other factors.

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Kindle Excerpt:

 © 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.