My Personal Haven: The Game of Life - Shattered Dreams

Mythology.

Wherever you see, you can find books on mythology.

As a child I can remember being told stories from mythology. Be it Ramayana or Mahabharata, the stories from epics were always a favourite among grandparents.

One of the greatest epics in Indian Mythology is Ramayana and it remains less explored than the Mahabharata. The Ramayana in itself has been told by many personalities repeatedly.

Ramayana has various versions - like Kamba Ramayana by Kambar, Tulsidas Ramayana and many more versions. On all the same versions, the basic instinct of the story remains the same. There is no change in the characters, but there is change in the characterization. Each version remains an epic in its own sense.

Now, coming to the modern versions, you have many. Each author has tried to bring out the basic essence of it to the core and some has succeeded and some has fought a lost battle.

In this book, The Shattered Dreams by Shubh Vilas, the author has tried to reproduce the context of the book in his own way. The Game of Life series is a trilogy and The Shattered Dreams is the second book in the series.

It starts with how Dhasaratha, the king of Ayodhya happened to give the fate changing wishes to Kaikeyi.

With each and every narration, the author has included the justification in each and every action. Though we have read many versions, this book deals with the philosophical part of Ramayana.

In each and every part and at the end of every chapter, the author has listed out the values that the original authors of Ramayana have tried painstakingly.

On reading this book, you get to know about the other side of the great epic.

But as a book in total, I was not able to get into the soul of the book or rather to put it in a different way, the soul connection was missing with this book, which rarely happens with me.

With each and every chapter, I found it hard to continue reading and as a result, the book took a long time to finish. It totally dampened the epic enthusiast in me.

The epics have become so popular nowadays and it is a welcome change, rather than reading some cheap romance. But the epics have deep stories in them and with that already having been explored by various authors, the authors trying to narrate their version must take that into account and try to create an even more interesting one without disturbing the root of it.
While comparing the book to a tree, the author has not tampered with the root of the story, but the leaves have been left to dry and the barks have shrunken.

Because of it, the book was hard to read and the narration was a bit 'weird'.