I think it was somewhere around last year that a writing competition was organized, with leading authors from around the country providing writing prompts for aspiring writers to weave stories out of. Needless to say, since I fall within the numbers of such aspiring writers and picked up my pen to flesh out an entry for Amish Tripathi’s prompt. One does not have to be particularly aware of the competition to guess that it was a semi-historical prompt that dealt with topics of regionality and an indian identity. Now, there is nothing wrong with staying true to one’s forte and many would say Amish Tripathi has done an excellent job in mastering the history-mythology domain. Quite predictably he had jumped from the Shiva trilogy to one of the two greatest ‘epic’ hero stories in India, the Ramayana, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Mahabharata follows in the form of Kurukshetra Chronicles (wait, I think I have read that title somewhere already!).
One of the plagues in the world of Indian creative writing currently seems to be an absolute lack of imagination. Sounds ironic, doesn’t it? Take a look at the Chetan Bhagat phenomenon. One successful BTech-MBA turned writer with tales of his college days, memories of his working days, management college and a gradual trend of tales pantering to a commercial youth audience went on to create a horde of such writers and now the market is flooded with paraphrased book titles that are hard to distinguish from the preface of the books. My previous rant on the same can be found here : <insert link>. Then Amish Tripathi happened.
The Shiva trilogy is highly captivating and I give it no less credit for the same. I have read it too long back to comment on the writing but it shall be a lie if I say that I haven’t read the series. Although I would have preferred the last book to be less of an attempt to thicken the volume, it deserves the applause it received. And then it gave rise to a bunch of me-toos. Suddenly, you had retellings of mythology everywhere. Indra? Check. Arjuna? Check. Kaurava? Check. Ravana? Check. And these are just the ones I have come across. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone mistakes some political idols around the country as mythological ones and spawns a retelling of the same. Some of them might be gems, but there are too many, just too many to not see this as a lack of creativity. If it sells, sell it till you are literally shoving it down the throat of readers.
Enter Ashwin Sanghi. I don’t recall when I picked up the Krishna key but it cannot be more than 5 years ago. I immediately got a Dan Brown vibe from the way the author was trying to convey the story, with ‘facts’ and more facts crammed into a story that didn’t stop to catch its breath. The writing quality did keep one wanting but it was my maiden book for this author and I decided to reserve my judgement for later.
Now, after the Rozabal line and more recently, the Sialkot Saga, my hopes behind this author seem to be in vain as the writing goes into a downward spiral. Rozabal Line was more of a page turner than Krishna Key, but at times felt like it was holding your face to an encyclopaedia and making you read. Don’t get me wrong, I love gaining knowledge through stories and one of my favorite authors, Arthur Hailey had a writing style that sometimes sacrificed storytelling to convey facts. But there is a storyteller’s way of doing the same. Shoving your research into pages as it is for the readers to consume is equivalent to using sleazy centrefolds to sell your books according to me.
The Sialkot saga could very well have been a series of newspapers from the last 50 years stitched together with some dialogues and character details inserted sporadically. It almost literally feels like the author sat with a copy of Dongri to Dubai on one side and any commerce enthusiastic Marwari on another and fabricated a story that comes across as a pale reflection of Kane and Abel, complete with their kids falling in love and getting married in another country. The world war and its atrocities are replaced by the India – Pakistan partition. Forcefully cramming events like the World Trade centre attacks, the 26/11 attacks, the Mumbai local train bomb blasts, Gujarat riots, earthquake etc almost seems like an insulting mad rush to not miss out on any event of any significance from an average Indian history book. Trust me, this one could very well be a rough draft for a larger story being sold in the guise of a book. Even Jeffery Archer’s recently adopted trope of lifelong lovers almost turning out to be siblings gets a guest appearance here. At least the names in the Archer’s epoch had a biblical significance, whereas in Sanghi’s novel, the repeated “Ar” in Arvind and Arbaaz betray a laziness that I truly hope is a figment of my imagination. And I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, so all I’d rather say is it was very anti-climatic, the sudden and unceremonious demise of certain characters that the story builds up as well as the secret plot being hinted at behind the scenes. In fact, it almost feels like Sanghi rushed a deadline on this one.
The entire book feels like a script writer explaining a potential script to a disinterested actor, and I would really recommend you to put this one down if you are thinking of buying it. Alas, I had not done the same.
Arnab Mukherjee 