Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Parva, the practical Mahabharata by Mr. S L Bhyrappa
After reading the 10 volume Mahabharata and the 2 volume Ramayana by Mr. Bibek Debroy (May his sould rest in peace), I assumed that my cravings for these great works have been satisfied. However, this was short lived. It was re-kindled by talks of Mr. R. Ganesh. R. Ganesh is a popular reviewer/presenter/reader of Sanskrit texts and an expert in decoding these texts for the average listener and a great orator. During one of his talks he mentioned about a work by Mr. S L Bhyrappa, the last scion of Kannada literature, the pure poet. I had known about his works and majority of his works have been made into fantastic films by very talented directors for the Kannada film industry. I had not followed much of his recent works and was shocked to see how active he is. I knew the names of the novels he had written.
However, one novel, in particular had a name which was not telling the objective of its creation. I am talking about Parva. Parva is the "novelization" of the Mahabharata. The last line which I wrote took 1 second. Now, you put that line in your head and imagine the gargantuan effort which must have gone into this project. When I read the complete work of Mahabharata, there was a feeling of completeness. As I started reading Parva, it was as if I am reading the ultimate thriller/cliffhanger. The layout of the novel, the way it starts, the dialogues, the progression.... OMG. Pure ecstasy. Mr. S L Bhyrappa traversed the entire physical path/locations of the Mahabharata to get the feel of the places, the climate, the culture etc. Starting with calculating the age of the most senior character, Bhisma, he arrived at the relative age of all the myriad number of characters in the epic. He also read multiple versions of the Mahabharata in sanskrit to understand the undercurrent in the story. He visited as many places as possible, which are their own characters in the epic. Once all this got settled in his head, he started writing the novel.
Having started reading the book, it is difficult to tell I am reading the Mahabharata. Now, I understand why many directors are now interested in making a film(s) out of it. Mr. S L Bhyrappa has perfected the art of converting this epic to the style of a novel. Suddenly, all the directors who did not have time to read the Mahabharata, can now read it like a thriller. The book has "fleshed" out the various characters in great detail. The art department of whoever is going to make a film about it, will just have to follow the description, which I have found very practical. Writings in Sanskrit have one thing in common. They try to cramp in maximum information in very few words. This is an art form which was required in old times since, books were non-existent and writings on palm leaves, in Sanskrit was extremely strenuous activity.
The works in Sanskrit were made for distribution through singing. The performer was to know it by-heart, the text and all the information regarding the volume, the raga etc. This would enable him to perform/share any time. This was then passed on to the next generation. Mr. S L Bhyrappa has used the same methodology here. If you skip one line, it is like you are skipping an entire chapter. Fantastic.
Practicality has been taken to the very extreme by the author. So, you are a person who is skeptical about miracles, unbelievable stories and you want only a practical explanation for all the occurrences. You have come to the right place. The description of heat, the monsoons, the struggle of people during the high temperatures, the limitations of technology available/known at the time all make very engaging reading. However, all the while maintaining the integrity of the epic. The last 20 - 30 pages looked a little hurried and tried to fill in so much information, my head started to hurt. It is an overdose of philosophical thought. These pages indicate the turmoil, the heart/brain of the author felt through the writing of the novel.
The book is not written, like, the author read a portion of the epic and translated the same. Here, the author took the entire epic into his head and retold the same with all his practical insights and keeping the structure of the epic intact. What effort. It is sad that the Mahabharata and the Ramayana do not get the same amount of exposure/love/critical observations compared to the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, which again, is a subset of what the Mahabharata is.
The Mahabharata, translated verbatim, goes to nearly 10 volumes, each of a minimum of 500/600 pages. Compare this with the exact translation of the Iliad and Odyssey. You may feel that majority of the portion will be cruft, like majority of the modern novels. You will be surprised that you will be proved wrong and you will be happy about it. If you had the drive to read the Iliad and Odyssey do not miss the Mahabharata and the Ramayana for anything. Add these works to the books to be read before you end your Human existence.
Mr. S L Bhyrappa has taken up the challenge of taking up this huge work and made it into a novel. This is possible since he has included all the stories/sub-stories/parallel stories as an aside during the conversation of characters within themselves or with others. He has used the smaller characters, talk about bigger characters, to bring a more earthy feel to the novel. He further completes the circle by making the larger characters talks a little about the lesser known ones. As a reader, you are in for a visual treat. For the puritans of the epics, there are shocks awaiting nearly every page. Only he could have pulled out this novel based on the epics. You can now understand why Suddenly people want to make it into movies. I still feel it is not going to be easy. However, they will try. There is a huge cache of gold to be minted.
All the epics of the world make use of similes to explaining the grandness or the scale of things. Even Iliad and Odyssey are no exceptions. I heard somewhere on the public network that the Iliad has around 180 similes. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana is full of them. There will be no passage which does not include a simile and hence very difficult to count(As per me they appeared infinite, Or I have not come across any counts). But, Parva, does not believe in the similes. It presents the story as a practical explanation depending on the strength of the language and the imagination of the reader to gather the scenario. This is interesting since epics are full of dialogues, with reader listening to the one sided lecture. In Parva, the reader takes the center place owing to the "practicalization" of the situation and the characters.
Mr. S L Bhyrappa is a prolific writer. If you look him up, all his works have been received on the grandest scale. All his works are different and tackle many different social issues. All his works are a standard for all the further writers writing in that specific subject. All his works have been translated into English. A foreign reader might find it difficult to read him since it is strongly rooted in the Indian society and culture. For me, the Mahabharata is his best work. The only work which gave him anxiety issues, the only work which made him meet a psychologist. But, I will take this result and wish him many more years of writing and me many more years of reading him. According to me he is the last of the Kannada authors with a writing of that high stature. Mr. S L Bhyrappa, thank you for all your writings. Further, I request you to KEEP WRITING. Lucky to be alive during your time.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
The evolution of reading
Disclaimer: All the information provided is to be consumed(if) with no reponsibility attributable to me. Reader discretion is adviced regarding all the issues mentioned in the post.
If there is one hobby which is universal across the world and the most followed hobby, it would be Reading. Now reading is a very broad word. It can mean reading a newspaper from the first word to the last word without much of internal processing. It can be reading a weekly, nonthly or yearly magazine with a little bit of processing. It could be reading a novel visualizing all the characters and the plot so as to stay in that realm for a finite time. It could be reading for gaining new knowledge, upgrading knowledge, assimilating knowledge and maybe for a few create fresh knowledge. The latter one takes the maximum amount of internal processing. Now all this is available to the common man after the gutenberg printing revolution. This revolution has created readers over the continium of minimum processing to max processing of the brain by the readers. Books were everywhere. All the knowledge accumulated till then in varied forms of storage reached the common man on paper. The most cost effective form of sharing and recieiving knowledge. Books had their own charm. The process of buying a book itself is one of the most satisfying excercise of human life. The collection of books in anybody's house speaks volumes about the individual. Again here individuality of hyman race stands out. There are no two similar individuals who read or write books. The fingerprints are vastly different when it comes to consumption and creation of books.
In the intial era of book printing, the contents were normally textual form, augmented by a very few illustrations, if and when requireed. Maybe an illustration for every chapter. This trend was later turned around with text taking the second precedence over the visual content. The creater wants to talk to the reader in a more visual realm and in exact terms of his vision. The textual realm allows for every reader to have his own visual realm, albeit with minor or major differences based on the invlolvement of the reader and the description of the writer. But with visuals taking precedence over text, the reader has to be in the realm of the writer. These books we now call them, comics, graphic novels. I dont find much difference between a comic and a graphic novel(Since this is a pure text post, the readers are welcome to choose their own visual realm for differences between the two).
With technology picking up great pace, computers taking over majority of the mundane human tasks, creating and reading content have also changed over the decade. The big change for content consumption have been mobiles, tablets and most importantly e-readers. Here, when i say e-readers I am talking about devices which work on reflected light. The other classes of devices work on backlight. The human eye is trained for reflected light. It is not designed for long hours staring of light originating. The eyes adore the beauty of te moon than the sun which the former just reflects. We see things through reflected light. We differentiate objects based the amount of light that is reflected, its wavelenghts and intenskty. We tend to look away from direct sources of light. It is no secret that people found it tiring to read on LCD/LED screens powering the phones and tablets. The skim reading or just going through and article augured well for these devices. But continous reading possible with a physical book i impossible with these devices.
Enter the e-reader. The most important innovation in the present digital world for bookworms. The ereaders have all the technologies available on modern computer devices with a reflective display. The human eyes love reflective displays. If you want to read a physical book you need to have a light source somewhere in the room. If your are reading in broad daylight, the physical book is much more easy to read. The same tech is used in an ereader. If your are in the dark, you cannot read from the ereader. Yes, there have been work arounds by putting LED's on the edges of the ereader screen to assist in reading at night but, there is still a certain amount of direct light which hits your eye with thes devices but, it is a good start. I stil love reading with a bed lamp than an ereader weith LEDs on the side.
Now let us see what these ereaders can do
1. They can hold enormous amounts of books
2. Bookmarking is as easy as exiting the book and chosing a new one to read
3. Add annotations
4. Check for meaning of word which the author has intentionally used to more understand his point of view
5. Battery life of nearly a month on one single charge
6. Buying books on your couch, on your train or bus journey
7. and much more
Let us complete it with what an ereader cant do
1. Give u the arom of a new book or the bliss of opening an old book
2. The joy of reaching the right page where we left off and forgotten to bookmark it
3. The joy of hinting a friend writing on the specific page regarding some history or a deja-vu
4. No question of battery life
5. The joy and the fulfilness of buying a physical book after a tiring journey of the bookstore just to realize that the first book you saw while entering was the book you want to buy
6. The vanishing individual's book shelf
7. The infinite sharing of books
The most hated aspect of all ereaders is the incorporation of DRM, wherein the books are tied to you and you are in no way entitled to share it with your friends and family, mitigating free will. One more thing i hated was their size. You are not able to read a magazine or a graphic novel or a comic in its true size. The most bacic problem is they dont display pdfs in their full glory. If the ereader does support pdfs, the problem is that the format doesnt flow and adjust to the screen like epups format. Normally all pdfs are genereated based on an 4 size sheet which is what printed magazines come out in. Trying to read it on a regular ereader would involve pinching and zooming complicated by thre refresh rates of the e-ink reflective tech screens.
Since the advent of ereaders I always wanted a device capable of dishing out pdfs and graphic intensive books. This prompted me to consider a 10" tablet. But, the issue here is that they are backlit. Yes, the colors are beautiful, but, your eyes get tire very easily. In the beginning of the year there was a lot of interest for producing ereaders with larger screens prompted by the company supplying majority of hte e-ink type of devices. Their 13.3" e-ink display prompted all this sudden interest. Sony came out with a device with an exhorbitant cost and capable of reading only pdfs. This was clearly aimed at the enterprise market and I believe it was(is ?) mostly made to order.
A chinese complany showed interest in making one with the same screen. They have already shipped the first batch of their devices and it is called the Boox Max. This is one company which is serious in their e-reader offerings, They have all kind of sizes with the latest being 13.3". They have an all metal eraeder, a 9.5", 6" and I think many more. The 13.3" got my fancy and I followed it up since their announcment. There is a german website which is taking pre-orders for the second batch of Boox Max if your are interested. The tech spec is on their website. I would just like to add that on the software side there are some glitches. There are occasional freezes. The company has promised updates to the android version as well as its bundled applications. But, reading on it is a breeze. it has re-kindled the reading in me. The greyscale display puts me right back to the gutenberg era. Reading comics and graphic novels is an experience. Reading an epub format file with plenty of books available on the guternberg project, it is perfect. The text is crisp, the display size is perfect. The battery life for such a huge device is definitely good. Did I forget to tell it has the Android play store, wifi, bluetooth, audio jack. Another downer is that you have to interact with the device only with the stylus provided. There are buttons for page turns, but the interaction with the device is only throught the stylus provided. That is ok since you will not be pinching and zooming at all. Once u open a book it is only with the next page and the previous page.
The product page : Boox Max
User discussion forum: Mobilleread
Pre-order Boox Max: Ereader-store
Wiki: Boox wiki
Happy reading.
If there is one hobby which is universal across the world and the most followed hobby, it would be Reading. Now reading is a very broad word. It can mean reading a newspaper from the first word to the last word without much of internal processing. It can be reading a weekly, nonthly or yearly magazine with a little bit of processing. It could be reading a novel visualizing all the characters and the plot so as to stay in that realm for a finite time. It could be reading for gaining new knowledge, upgrading knowledge, assimilating knowledge and maybe for a few create fresh knowledge. The latter one takes the maximum amount of internal processing. Now all this is available to the common man after the gutenberg printing revolution. This revolution has created readers over the continium of minimum processing to max processing of the brain by the readers. Books were everywhere. All the knowledge accumulated till then in varied forms of storage reached the common man on paper. The most cost effective form of sharing and recieiving knowledge. Books had their own charm. The process of buying a book itself is one of the most satisfying excercise of human life. The collection of books in anybody's house speaks volumes about the individual. Again here individuality of hyman race stands out. There are no two similar individuals who read or write books. The fingerprints are vastly different when it comes to consumption and creation of books.
In the intial era of book printing, the contents were normally textual form, augmented by a very few illustrations, if and when requireed. Maybe an illustration for every chapter. This trend was later turned around with text taking the second precedence over the visual content. The creater wants to talk to the reader in a more visual realm and in exact terms of his vision. The textual realm allows for every reader to have his own visual realm, albeit with minor or major differences based on the invlolvement of the reader and the description of the writer. But with visuals taking precedence over text, the reader has to be in the realm of the writer. These books we now call them, comics, graphic novels. I dont find much difference between a comic and a graphic novel(Since this is a pure text post, the readers are welcome to choose their own visual realm for differences between the two).
With technology picking up great pace, computers taking over majority of the mundane human tasks, creating and reading content have also changed over the decade. The big change for content consumption have been mobiles, tablets and most importantly e-readers. Here, when i say e-readers I am talking about devices which work on reflected light. The other classes of devices work on backlight. The human eye is trained for reflected light. It is not designed for long hours staring of light originating. The eyes adore the beauty of te moon than the sun which the former just reflects. We see things through reflected light. We differentiate objects based the amount of light that is reflected, its wavelenghts and intenskty. We tend to look away from direct sources of light. It is no secret that people found it tiring to read on LCD/LED screens powering the phones and tablets. The skim reading or just going through and article augured well for these devices. But continous reading possible with a physical book i impossible with these devices.
Enter the e-reader. The most important innovation in the present digital world for bookworms. The ereaders have all the technologies available on modern computer devices with a reflective display. The human eyes love reflective displays. If you want to read a physical book you need to have a light source somewhere in the room. If your are reading in broad daylight, the physical book is much more easy to read. The same tech is used in an ereader. If your are in the dark, you cannot read from the ereader. Yes, there have been work arounds by putting LED's on the edges of the ereader screen to assist in reading at night but, there is still a certain amount of direct light which hits your eye with thes devices but, it is a good start. I stil love reading with a bed lamp than an ereader weith LEDs on the side.
Now let us see what these ereaders can do
1. They can hold enormous amounts of books
2. Bookmarking is as easy as exiting the book and chosing a new one to read
3. Add annotations
4. Check for meaning of word which the author has intentionally used to more understand his point of view
5. Battery life of nearly a month on one single charge
6. Buying books on your couch, on your train or bus journey
7. and much more
Let us complete it with what an ereader cant do
1. Give u the arom of a new book or the bliss of opening an old book
2. The joy of reaching the right page where we left off and forgotten to bookmark it
3. The joy of hinting a friend writing on the specific page regarding some history or a deja-vu
4. No question of battery life
5. The joy and the fulfilness of buying a physical book after a tiring journey of the bookstore just to realize that the first book you saw while entering was the book you want to buy
6. The vanishing individual's book shelf
7. The infinite sharing of books
The most hated aspect of all ereaders is the incorporation of DRM, wherein the books are tied to you and you are in no way entitled to share it with your friends and family, mitigating free will. One more thing i hated was their size. You are not able to read a magazine or a graphic novel or a comic in its true size. The most bacic problem is they dont display pdfs in their full glory. If the ereader does support pdfs, the problem is that the format doesnt flow and adjust to the screen like epups format. Normally all pdfs are genereated based on an 4 size sheet which is what printed magazines come out in. Trying to read it on a regular ereader would involve pinching and zooming complicated by thre refresh rates of the e-ink reflective tech screens.
Since the advent of ereaders I always wanted a device capable of dishing out pdfs and graphic intensive books. This prompted me to consider a 10" tablet. But, the issue here is that they are backlit. Yes, the colors are beautiful, but, your eyes get tire very easily. In the beginning of the year there was a lot of interest for producing ereaders with larger screens prompted by the company supplying majority of hte e-ink type of devices. Their 13.3" e-ink display prompted all this sudden interest. Sony came out with a device with an exhorbitant cost and capable of reading only pdfs. This was clearly aimed at the enterprise market and I believe it was(is ?) mostly made to order.
A chinese complany showed interest in making one with the same screen. They have already shipped the first batch of their devices and it is called the Boox Max. This is one company which is serious in their e-reader offerings, They have all kind of sizes with the latest being 13.3". They have an all metal eraeder, a 9.5", 6" and I think many more. The 13.3" got my fancy and I followed it up since their announcment. There is a german website which is taking pre-orders for the second batch of Boox Max if your are interested. The tech spec is on their website. I would just like to add that on the software side there are some glitches. There are occasional freezes. The company has promised updates to the android version as well as its bundled applications. But, reading on it is a breeze. it has re-kindled the reading in me. The greyscale display puts me right back to the gutenberg era. Reading comics and graphic novels is an experience. Reading an epub format file with plenty of books available on the guternberg project, it is perfect. The text is crisp, the display size is perfect. The battery life for such a huge device is definitely good. Did I forget to tell it has the Android play store, wifi, bluetooth, audio jack. Another downer is that you have to interact with the device only with the stylus provided. There are buttons for page turns, but the interaction with the device is only throught the stylus provided. That is ok since you will not be pinching and zooming at all. Once u open a book it is only with the next page and the previous page.
The product page : Boox Max
User discussion forum: Mobilleread
Pre-order Boox Max: Ereader-store
Wiki: Boox wiki
Happy reading.
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