Message Is In The Medium

Recently, I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, and incidentally found out that the Constitution of India is less than half of the length of the fantasy novel. This piqued my curiosity and I wondered why more people do not read the Indian Constitution; why is it such a feared document and left only for the evil group of people who academically study law. Of course Indian people were never fond of reading and the times of literary dominance in Indian culture dates back to days when not much was really written and all literary works were composed orally and passed through spoken words. But even the tiny reading community of India shies away from the document defining and describing the rights of the citizens. I tried to look into the reasons why it is not a readable book for Indians. The Indian Constitution is accepted to be the longest constitution in the world. That might seem a daunting fact but the document is nowhere a tome, standing ...

The Great Indian Novel  by Shashi Tharoor sits on the shoulders of two mammoth Indian fables everyone discusses still no one really knows about. The epic myth Mahabharata by Vyasa and India's historical struggle for freedom, that come together in this book, are both tales so far behind in the past they might as well be the same for the  young  India of today. Tharoor binds the two sagas, dwindling between facts and myth, which feels like a fading memory or an elaborate dream, to create this masterpiece. But one must not consider it religious just because it follows the plot of a Hindu epic; the book tells the history of India. The epic myth Mahabharata provides the satirical vehicle for the story. The Great Indian Novel  tells the tale of India's freedom struggle and the subsequent culture of majoritarian democracy in the country through the characters and events of the Mahabharata. The characters in Tharoor's novel lie somewhere between their counterparts in ...