The Pregnant King - Dr Devadutt Patanaik

Today.. when section 377 causes so much of an uproar...where political parties feel threatened by gender equality, homosexuality and quota for women...where female infanticide is as much a reality as child marriage...its interesting to find something like the pregnant kind hardly being discussed in the media or otherwise.. not that the book is extraordinary..but considering the fact that "The white tiger" wins awards..this one atleast deserves a good mention.. Apart from Jai.. I have hardly come across any references ..

The story is set around the Mahabharata and its merges both the fiction and mythological parts...although too many references of gender confusion tends to make it a bit too forceful.

We tend to summarize the Mahabharata solely on the Kurukshetra and the war that these short stories build around it which probably are much more interesting and relevant are missed out..And these are exactly the kind of stories that reflect the hypocrisy of the society that we have landed ourself in...also evident from the fact that we have converted both the Ramayana and Mahabharata into a preachy textbook rather than just a documentation of the civilization that we lived in.

A case of exploding mangoes

There is always something interesting when one reads books from across the border..a lot of revelations.. some misconceptions cleared..although one finds it strange that one had them to begin with ..considering the fact that one never actually gave it too much of a thought..probably just as a reference to Kargil (they were the proverbial villains) or when Benazir got assassinated..of course n the cricket ground ..they were the guys you had to always defeat..even if we lost all other matches..
But these books (well..alteast the three I have read so far...the earlier ones were partition based or from authors who have had to move from here to there..so at some levels they don't invoke the same feelings or rather thoughts).. they provide some sort of an insight.. not much is different from people out there as they are here... although Hamid's book more so as compared to Hanif's.. Hanif's is more black humor (if I understand the definition right)..and would make a brilliant movie.. with someone like Kundan shah or better still Vishal B at the helm..
The Zia in this and the caricature they created in Charlie Wilson's war are quite strangely similar and dissimilar at the same time..
Anyhoo..this is one brilliant book and is totally worth a read.