Book Review of "Pashu" written by Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik

Copyright (c) Shubhrata V Prakash

Mythology is in. Has been "In" since Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" recorded phenomenal success and sales. In fact, Brown's own "Angels and Demons", which preceeded "The Da Vinci Code", gained recognition only after the latter's success. Mythology in India was a theme just waiting to be exploited. Except for the Amar Chitra Katha series, there were few takers for mythological books, especially in English. Truth be told, there were very few Indian writers in English in the decades prior to the 2000s. 

What opened the floodgates for mythology post 2000s were two unrelated and serendipitous happenings -  The Da Vinci Code and Chetan Bhagat. And both happened around the same time. So we have many successful Indian authors who have written on books around mythology. Ashwin Sanghi, Shatrujeet Nath, Amish Tripathy are some very successful writers in the genre. Even Ajay Pandey has used mythology in his debut book, "Resonance". However, the works of these authors is in the genre of thrillers based on Indian Mythology.

One Indian author, who has been writing books on mythology only as a form of story-telling of mythological tales, is Dr Devdutt Pattanaik. Yes, he is an actual physician, who later, turned leadership consultant and mythologist. And he is the one credited with writing on Shiva, which inspired the much-watched and much-appreciated TV series "Devon ke Dev: Mahadev". One of his latest offerings comes in the form of "Pashu - Animal Tales from Hindu Mythology". I first laid my eyes on this book with its lime-green jacket, covered with beautiful indigenous-style (mostly tribal) illustrations, when I was "haunting" my favourite haunt - Crossword. I picked it up and realized what a treasure it was for making my children acquainted with animals in mythology.

My children are still at the beginners' level when it comes to reading. In this day and age, I find Amar Chitra Katha losing out to the Chhota Bheems and Doraemons. And I find it difficult to "read out" from an illustrated comic. So "Pashu" was an ideal solution to the problem of making my children familiar with some mythology. The book hasn't failed me. The children are deeply into it. We read a few pages every night. The font type and style are ideal for reading, even by 7-8 year olds. The language is simple enough to be understood by the same age group. The illustrations are simply breath-taking. All animals - snakes, birds, fish, cows- have tribal motifs on their bodies. Females are adorned with bindis, jewellery and even plaited hair. Even the occasional human form one encounters in the book, is similarly motif-ed. And the illustrations have been credited to the author himself.

There are tales about Timi,Vinata, Kadru, Surabhi, Sarama and Surasa, and their respective children - fish, birds, snakes, cows, tigers and demon-forms. There is Nandi, Naga-loka, Deva-loka and so much happening all over. Long and winding tales have been simplified. Since much of mythology has references to sex, and the conception of various species of animals, it is interesting to see how such concepts have been de-sensationalized, and simplified, for children to read and understand. The same treatment has been administered to violence and blood-shed as well.

Overall, a very interesting read for both children and adults. There are so many mythological stories and characters in it, which I had never heard of, and I have been an Amar-Chitra-Katha-guzzling kid, if there was any! Highly recommended to all parents of children between 5-15 years of age.

Kick Kick Mein

I have never had the himmat (courage) to see either of the "Himmatwalla"s. The original or the remake. Wild horses couldn't drag me to the theatre to see the remake. Of course, the decision on the original was made by my parents, as I was a tiny little girl then, and of course they, like others born in their decade, had quite a taste for class, not crass.

So, while the first one had weird songs, things got weirder with part two. BPL or "Bum Pe Laat". A kick in the a....., which for the sake of those below 18 reading this post, we shall simply call "the rear". See, still that sounds cheesy 'cause it sounds very much like......errr......the real thing! Now that's a real class of a song! Even third class is, after all, a class!! Lyrics, music, choreography, the whole works. Even Tamanna Bhatia's "the rear", which was intended to have been the prize bull's eye for the "Laat" (kick).

Haah. So you thought this post was about "Himmatwalla"?! No..nnno..nno...no. No. After beating around several bushes, which may or may not have been as shapely as Tamanna's you-know-what, we come to the heart of this post which is about a movie called Kick. Kick? As in kick-in-the-.....err....."the rear"? Or the ones Messi and his team-mates sure got by the foot-fuls after they fooled with their foots? Sorry, feet. Or the ones that Laloo got when he tried to mess with the feet, sorry feed, of some very angry bovines?

No. Kick is not about that kind of, well, kick. Kick is about kick. Kick, as in what Salman bhai gets from driving dangerously on Mumbai roads and chasing endangered animals with loaded guns. Kick out of life. Kick out of doing really weird stuff, which were understood and appreciated only by his weirder parents (Mithun Chakravarty and Archana Puran Singh). And, of all, people, a psychiatrist (Jaqueline Fernandez, post some kind of cosmetic procedure) falls in love with him. Like a biologist would with a guinea pig. Or probably a physicist with a quark. Quite quarky, no, quirky, isn't it? Throw in a lean and mean kick-a** cop (Randeep Hooda), who has foreign cops and diplomats getting their orders from him. And Ek Villain called Shiv Gajra (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who gets his kicks from making people kick-the-bucket even before their time for kicking the bucket has come. And also from making a kick, no, tick, no, "tock"-like sound from his mouth, after he's gotten his "kick".

That's all folks. That's all that's there in the movie. Else, the movie is like a kick, and a real and hard one at that, to one's frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, cortex, even the well-embedded hard-to-get at hypothalamus, and may be even some still undiscovered parts of the human brain. A kick to one's senses and sensibilities. A kick to bucks too, though not the black variety, but the paper ones which reside within the interiors of our wallets. Even a raunchy item number, by a gyrating Nargis Fakhri, failed to give the audience their paisa-wasool (money's worth) kick. The seats in the theatre were probably itching to give our rears a kick, as I found it extremely difficult to sit for the entire length of the movie. Especially after my writer's brain got a penalty kick, when the climax turned out to be, well, not the climax. Chetan Bhagat?

After so many kicks, the audience is left black, blue and bruised. That is not being very human, Salman bhai.
When the credits rolled by, the psychiatrist heroine was also gyrating. If only the director and script-writers had made her talk to the traumatized audience, suffering from PTSD, to explain the kick they got in making Kick and getting us kicked! Probably some counselling would have done the kick, sorry, trick and soothed "the rear" after so many BPLs.

In retrospect, may be my parents weren't very pragmatic in their child "rear"-ing. Had they taken me for "Himmatwalla" in my childhood, I would have withstood the BPLs of Kick, with less trauma in my adulthood. I wonder if I, too, made the same mistake by not taking my kids to Kick. Probably they would have been better prepared for watching a 30-years-later remake of Kick, without getting their rears kicked.