Asura - Story from Ravana's side

[OYMWA]

Re: Asura - Story from Ravana’s side

@Jack_Sparrow

^ I have read Satanic Verses, and it does not claim to tell the life story of the Prophet. To that extent, its pure fiction.

Asura on the other hand claims to retell Ramayana from the opposite point of view. Nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t twist “facts” stated in the original. Otherwise, just call it inspired fiction.

Here is another 1 star review of the book -

The book didn’t seem as author s debut. Truly astounding flow with powerful language.Author seems to be a very capable writer.

But it was very disappointing to see such a capable person twisting the original Ramayana and have compromised too much on the facts. This may be about Ravana’s perspective, but it doesn’t demand the twisting of Ramayana facts.
For instance Rama’s life as per Ramayana is 11000 years. But the author has portrayed the incidents sprawling across a period of 70+ years.Now, if the question is around if human life can be that long , then more research should be done on what evolution could have done rather than changing the timeline to some believable number the author pleases. The war scene is highly compromised to put Rama in bad light and Ravana in good.Many other facts are comfortably ignored to put Ravana in good light.This reaches a wider audience than the original Valmiki’s scripture. There is a good chance of people believing the author’s “pure imagination” as fact just because it is more believable than the original scripture or this is more reachable than the original scripture.
**Many myths can be twisted as we like,but Ramayana is not a myth. It is a scripted epic which has too many myths surrounding. Even considering, the epic to be just a fiction and not a real happening , still we don’t have the right to twist the tale as we please.
**
If the author had a fair eye to understand the script of Valmiki as it is, and then made the story with Ravana’s perspective-it would have been the truly Asura story.With that kind of expectation, I picked the book, but was disappointed.

I don’t think talking from Ravana’s perspective is wrong, but twisting the facts as we would like to hear so there are some anti-brahmin , anti-ramayana arguments is not acceptable.

Such a capable author could have more moral responsibility of researching more before taking his story to the world.

But this inspires me to understand 24000 slokas of Ramayana in more detail before judging more about the book.

Nevertheless, the language and story telling is truly enjoyable.

Isnt Ramayana itself fiction? A fable to teach people how to live their lives?