The Immortals of Meluha. By: Amish Tripathi

Time spent reading: 11hrs.30 minutes

One of my closest friends and a very talented photographer Biju Gopal of Bizos photography s hot the photograph of Amish Tripati which was used in the back cover of the book. He put me on to Amish and recommended I read the book. I never thanked him for that….so here it is Biju Gopal Thank you.

"And then this story happened. It wasn’t really one defining moment of epiphany. It sort of just crept up on me. Slowly, first the philosophies, and then the story to convey the philosophies. This experience has changed me. My outlook to life. My attitude. And my belief in God." - Amish Tripati

Short Summary

Combining commonly know mythological stories with some factual context, Amish Tripati a banker turned writer, presents to us a tale of extra ordinary adventure with larger than life characters and an integrated story.

The crux of the story is the life ‘Shiva’ a guna from the High mountains of the Himalayas and how he becomes the ‘Lord’ and ‘The Neelkanth’. Growing up, we have all heard the tales of ‘Lord Shiva’ and this book the first out of a series of three, shows the life of one of India’s most worshipped and lived Gods as if he was a common man on an adventure of a life time.

My Review

I have a lot of respect for Amish as a person. He did what we all dream of doing, quit a steady pay cheque and pursue his dream of telling a story. I do not live in “la la land’, I know Amish was a senior director of a well-established company with an IIT degree and not a account executive with a bachelors. His intelligence a smartness comes out in the way he has approached his work. He has kept his story simple and uncomplicated, there is very little interference in the character interaction from any commentary or footnotes.. The characters are introduced very well and have been given a deep and rich background story , once a character is introduced the audience is immediately able to connect with him. The character interactions are very well thought out and as a reader you immediately know where a particular character stands in the story.

The writing never sound verbose of preachy and the story telling is always engaging. I do not know, weather intentionally or not. Amish has presented the perfect world as it should be, in the guise of guidelines from ‘Shri Ram’. The challenge for the protagonist is not to build or establish the ideal world, but to re-establish it and preserve it from what he has been made to believe is the ideal way or the good way of living.

To round everything off, very simply it is a book about an adventure that a naïve, native takes along with some old friends and some new ones to self discovery and the destruction of evil.

My Take

I am a person who believes in an overall destiny and a higher order, I also believe in giving a 100% and accepting the way of life when things do not go my way even after trying. I simply cannot give into a higher power and let things take their course. I could connect with the protagonist in his mannerism and how when faced with the option presented to him by fate, he chooses the one based purely on his understanding of the truth. He never truly believes that he is anything but a simpleton from the mountains who wishes to do good by the people who have done good to his tribes men and him