War of Lanka by Amish Tripathi – book review

Like the Meluha series, War of Lanka happens to be the fourth and final installment of the Ramachandra series. Like how he distorted Shivapuranam to his material gains and ill-gotten popularity, Amish has butchered Ramayanam in these series to the maximum extent possible. Of all the people who have been baying India is intolerant, the success of these series is a testament to the patience and mindfulness of our people. Had it been any other religious book or any other famous book for that matter, where the lead characterization is distorted to this extent and glorification accompanied by misrepresentation in the name of fictional liberty, the author might’ve found himself in a precarious position if not life threatening. This book is nothing, but trash be it for the way of misrepresenting a holy epic. If not for the religious angle, even as a regular pulp fiction it is still garbage. Of the 4 books in the series, this is the worst. There is literally no space for story with only the travel of Bharatha and shatrugana from Ayodhya to the shores of Lanka explained like T&L channel program. The other aspect covered in detail being the naval warfare, where the author thinks of himself as Tom Clancy of previous Yuga, trying to paint a picture with a zillion words, leading the story to exactly nowhere. The most irritating thing for me was how he has characterized Ravana. The very fact that he kidnapped someone’s wife forcefully which led to his downfall, despite being a shiva bakthan and possessor of several weapons and boons has been distorted to the extent that, it is mentioned that Ravana wanted the war to happen and willingly sacrificed his life and his kith & kin just to ensure Rama became the leader of India !!! Wonder what the author was smoking when the wrote these sections!! It is obvious that he ran out of stock to twist the tale for a decent ending and messed it up royally. Be it the way he had represented Hanuman with a one side love story, skipping over several key role players in Ramayana and making a mess of the entire story line by pulling Bharatha and shatrugana in the final battle, all of them make a nauseatingly sick ending. My best guess is, like how I mentioned about one of the previous books, this guy must’ve written several pages in a rampage and literally played inky-pinky-ponky in deciding how to split them into multiple portions. The sad part being that the finale portion ended up being the blandest and stupidest of the lot. I am not against taking creative liberty and producing own versions of how one perceives other famous creations. But if you try to mimic Monalisa and end up with a hangman figurine, bouquets wouldn’t be filled with flowers but rather bricks.