"Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata" by Devdutt Pattanaik - My Review

Mahabharata is the epic which has been read or heard by millions of people for the past thousands of years. It is retold in different languages adding various flavours to the original Sanskrit scripture.

The author has rewritten the entire epic in a simple and straight forward way. He has added apt illustrations to make it more interesting. Making a story interesting, when it was already well known to the readers, is not an easy task. I need to appreciate Devdutt as well as Vyas, the original author of the epic for this. It was indeed an excellent effort by Devdutt.

I feel it would have been better if certain sections could have been elaborated more. Also, he did not clearly indicate which sections are from the original Mahabharata and which sections are from the other versions. Such details are given only at high level.

"The Pregnant King" by Devdutt Pattanaik - My Review

What is truth and what is not? What is good and what is evil? What is correct and what is incorrect? I have read a lot of books that deal with the above questions. But, this fantastic novel puts forth a different question. Who is man and who is woman? Who is mother and who is father? Does this matter at all?

A different, unique and intriguing story based on Mahabharata. Like Mahabharata, this book is also not merely a single story - it's collection of many similar stories interwoven with each other.

My appreciations to the author for his imagination and choosing this different story from the great epic. Many of us would have read the epic but no one would have imagined to write this complicated story in an interesting way.

I got curious with the title of this book. As I started completing each chapter, I became more curious thanks to the author's narrative style.

The last section is very philosophical and boring. It could have been written better.

The author uses a lot of explicit words and references throughout the book. Whatever be the subject of the book, I am sure he could avoided that. I don't want to blame him for this as many Indian English authors follow similar style of writing nowadays. This should change!