Book Review: Arjuna by Anuja Chandramouli: Huge Restitution Before The Final Journey

Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince ARJUNA by Anuja Chandramouli has been excellently stitched and smartly handled the mighty complex story of Mahabharata. Right since the childhood of an Indian few epic characters are so powerfully earmarked in his mind that they never go off right through his entire lifecycle. Arjuna is one of those characters that we start encountering during our early childhood days. Arjuna is one of the strongest characters of the mythological epic Mahabharata.

Arjuna by Anuja Chandramouli focuses Arjuna on the central stage with all other significant characters playing around. The story tells about Arjuna's love, friendship, learning, achievements, struggles, fights, wars, and tough times in his life. This well researched story has been written in a modern style with the basic theme of Mahabharata. The book begins with  a select cast of characters that will definitely help you in getting a brief of each character well in advance before jumping into the pond. I did refer to it at times while reading this interesting book. This book is a long journey starting with forefathers of Arjuna and taking you through the complete lifecycle of Arjuna. A great amount of information related this the epic mythological

Mahabharata that you will not be aware of, is presented here in this book.

Oveall if you see, Mahabharata is one of the most complex sagas in Indian Mythology. The story of Mahabharata is too complex, about the births and deaths, about relationships, about marriages and children, about their counts etc; that you certainly get lost at some or the other turn while riding through this journey. Few points that I would like to highlight regarding this book - Arjuna, and the writer - Anuja Chandramouli are listed below:

1. It is well appreciating on part of the author to take up this challenging task of handling such a complex story keeping in mind present day's readers mindset and thus presenting it in a modern style and penning it down in a 360 odd pages interesting read.

2. The sequence and inter crossing of incidents makes reader lose the track while reading, though best of the efforts have been made by the writer in handling it. Incidents happening at a later stage are told earlier thereby creating a little confusion.

3. I wished if this story had been written in a narrative style with 2 or 3 main characters in line - Arjuna, Krishna and Duryodhana. This way it would have become more interesting and would have removed some of the boredom encountered during the current style of reading. This would required an entirely different style of writing, though!

4. Few of the words were totally off the track and did not match with the seriousness of this epic mythological drama. For example using 'babes' in place of 'babies' made it a matter of laugh and shelved off all the seriousness the story was carrying.

5. Intense style of writing loses track at many instances and all of a sudden you start feeling you are reading a normal story with all seriousness and intensity lost.

6. Despite some shortfalls I would recommend this book to all readers interested in Indian Mythology as it delivers lot of important information about Arjuna and other characters of Mahabharata.

7. A glossary at the end is definitely going to help you.

8. Sequencing of 21 chapters in this 360 odd pages book has been done superbly.