Author: Aarthy Sundaram
Pages: 308
Year of Publication: 2016
Price: Rs 600
ISBN:
978-93-5045-129-8 (9789350451298)
About the Author:
Aarthy Sundaram was born in Tamil Nadu, India. She grew up and completed her schooling in Abu Dhabi (UAE) after spending two years in Saudi Arabia. Aarthy has been writing since the age of 8 and at 12, she self-published her first book, The Art of Knowing Your Blunders to Nature. She has written several prize-winning letters and short stories. When she is not writing, this twenty year old can be found reading, playing the piano, travelling, and preparing for a career in electronics engineering.
About the Book:
In her preface to the book, Aarthy writes:
“The culture I grew up with had marvellous stories to educate me on the difference between right and wrong. The epic Mahabharata was my bedtime story for long. I liked it because it was long enough to last a year and the countless number of stories that branched out from the centre plot kept me engaged. There were millions of characters, each with a significant story to tell.
While it was just mythology to me while I was a kid, I grew up to realize these were not just tales with fantasy creatures and gods, but that each was an answer to a moral dilemma that we face today. I write in the full understanding that mythology is not exclusive to the Mahabharata. But in my twenty years of life on earth, I had time only enough to have read one epic in detail and shall, later on in life, cover the others.
While reading through the various chapters, I found myself questioning a lot of ideas that were proposed. I found plenty of scope for developing all those I felt were loose ends. Those loose ends, I realized, had more interesting problems to resolve. And it was during one of those days that I ended up with a very intriguing dilemma. I wondered what I would do in such a situation. Since there wasn’t a simple straight answer to it, I became a character in that world and slowly watched the rest of them do what they thought was best, to resolve it. I found many of the characters facing the same problems that I was going through in real life and it was a pleasant surprise when I found my answers in them. It was a beautiful experience.
Now, how does it matter if these characters belonged to mythology or real life, if they faced the same dilemmas that we did? That is why I didn’t hesitate to pick up an epic that I read every day and weave a story out of it.
Because, be it on paper or in reality, we people are all made of the same things that make everything else. If that were not so, we couldn’t have made up this Universe together.”
Contents:
39 chapters