So, "The Oath of the Vayuputras" is done and dusted! - the third and final book in the Shiva Trilogy series. Almost every one in my friends and contact list had read or at least bought the book and stored in their shelf to read sometime later.
Well, I started with the first book of Amish in the Shiva Trilogy series, around one year back, when I was shuttling between Delhi and Chennai for one of my consulting assignments. At that point, already his first two books had come.
The concept behind the story is very simple, but the way it is executed is awesome. Amish places lots of dots in the plane and connects them well and makes a nice coherent story.
He asks a simple question "What if Lord Shiva was not a God as he was always imagined to be? What if He was just a human being?" And, takes us through the life of a man Shiva, who resided in Himalayas and how he ended up as a lead man for the Quest of His Time. And what is such a quest? To destroy Evil.
Shiva is made to believe that he is the One to go after Evil. And, who is that Evil? Shiva takes up the journey and finds the answer himself. In his journey, he is helped and guided by many people from a tribe of intellectual and spiritual advisors like Vasudevs to even a beggar outside a temple.
The first book sets up the the context, describes the ways of life of two main tribes Meluhans and Swadweepans (Suryavanshis and Chandravanshis) inhabited across the northern subcontinent. The book builds up the characters of Shiva and Sati (lead protagonists) nicely. The book introduces Naga and their unusual living, violence and an inclination for disrupting the normal lives of Meluhans. Characters like Parvateshwar (the war-general of Meluhans), Lord of the Nagas, Ayurvati, Nandi all introduced and built-up succinctly.
The second one, "The Secret of Nagas" explores the lives of Nagas. It introduces the readers to other regions like Branga, Panchavati (present day WB, MH respectively). It brings up and reveals some of the ugly secrets which was kept out of reach, for years by people in power. The conversations that Shiva has with Vasudevs are interesting and have lots of deep philosophical insights.
In all these books, Shiva keeps his search for Evil, the view on what is evil keeps changing every now and then. What considered evil, becomes not evil - it just a completely different way of leading life. Shiva proposes many hypothesis and keeps disproving all of them, until what he finds to be the ultimate evil in the 3rd book.
The third book involves lots of battles and strategic thinking behind the wars and battles, not that these are not present in the first two books - but the first two are more philosophical than war-strategic as compared to the third. The book gives enough hints of nuclear power being used in wars - talks about fission and fusion reactions.
Overall, there is a lot of insights and deep philosophical truths that can be derived from the books. It is definitely not a one-time read. Every new read will bring up some insights.
Looking forward to the second read, soon!
