Skip to main content

A New Romance

 


Book Review

Title: The Himadripuram Adventure

Author: Sitharaam Jayakumar

Goodness should win in the end of all conflicts. That classical notion has been illustrated brilliantly and imaginatively once more in this rather short novel by a good friend of mine.

Himadripuram is an imaginary kingdom that existed in a time when there was no electricity, no motor vehicles, and not even a postal system. That is a kind of romantic world. I mean the romance in the second of the meanings below. 

There is a fairly good king in Himadripuram. But his tenure is coming to an end. His son will take charge soon. However, that son, Veer Narayan, is an immature teenager who is a “combination of stupidity, greed and ambition.” The King, Devdutt Narayan, tries his best to drive some sense into the head of the crown prince, but to no avail. The King has to deal with another challenge too: an emerging rebellion led by people who are deviously powerful.

What if you have enemies within your family, within your close circles?  Even if you are the best administrator, you are likely to be doomed in such a situation. Political administration is not all about collecting taxes and managing the day-to-day affairs of the country. Relationships matter a lot even in political administration.

Relationships save Himadripuram in the end. How? You should read this novel to understand that. What I like most is how the hero of this novel [I’m using the word ‘hero’ instead of ‘protagonist’ because that’s how ancient this novel’s setting is] has a romantic relationship which is intricately woven into the complex fabric of the plot without ever dominating the plot. The politics and the complex mystery that drives it with the smoldering rebellion which the rebels call a Revolution keeps the love-romance subdued. The mystery-romance keeps us hooked better.

The book keeps you hooked, turning pages with immense curiosity. That is the author’s real success. He keeps you with him even though the world he presents belongs to some distant past.

There are some very striking twists in the end of this short novel. Let me leave those twists to your reading delight. The book is available at Amazon.

 

 

 

Comments

  1. magiceyeOctober 6, 2023 at 7:12 AM

    Sounds interesting. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JaiOctober 6, 2023 at 7:16 AM

    Thank you so much Tom for this very constructive and balanced review. As usual there is plenty to learn from what you have to say about my books. Thanks once again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanOctober 6, 2023 at 8:46 AM

    Hari OM
    Intriguing... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  4. NithyaOctober 6, 2023 at 1:09 PM

    A very balanced and mature review. I Am currently reading this book and am thoroughly enjoying the portions you have referred to.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more