The Immortals of Meluha - Amish

This book has a trailer!

Shiva Shiva!!

India is emerging and we are having the luxury of looking back. Amish a finance professional from IIM (must have gotten him through the publishers doors easily)

wrote this fictional piece based a little on mythology, a little on history, a little on geography and a whole lot on the Hindu concepts of continuation, karma and duality. The marketing was unprecedented - a trailer for a book! A preview of the first chapter etc etc.A trilogy announced even before the success of the first book. It actually made me vary of the book, hence the belated reading.

Siva is a Tibetan cheif of the Guna tribe. He fulfills the legendary conditions of Neelkanth, the Mahadev who will save the kingdom of Meluha, where a democratic distribution of Somras makes everyone young and live long (how long is never mentioned) Stuff keeps happening at regular intervals to keep up the readers interest and there is not much preaching - thankfully. Some stories and characters you will recognise, others have been cleverly introduced. Plus Siva being a pothead makes him extremely endearing in my books.A few modern interpretations can also be done with terrorists attacks, water sharing etc etc.

The only gripe I had was that some things like Sati being called Parvati - they were two different women according to my mythology (every part of India has it's own) and other obvious skewing of mythology which doesn't go down very well with mythology loving me. (not because I'm religious and don't want it to be changed, but because the real myths are so rich and colourful that its a dangerous thing to tamper with them) The obvious references to duality - chandravanshis and suryavanshis could have been a little more subtle. A huge mass of people are not just this or that!

 Otherwise its a good read. Although I hate it when the author ends the book with a cliffhanger just because its a trilogy and he wants you to buy/read the next book. Its an underhand technique and if he had done away with a bit of the commercialness I would have liked it better.

6/10