Over the next few days I shall share excerpts from my book ‘The Battle of Panchavati and Other Stories from Indian Scriptures’. The book is available in India as Paperback and ebook on Amazon and as Paperback on Flipkart. Outside India the book is currently available as an ebook on Amazon country/region specific sites and the International Paperback shall be out soon. The images used in this series of blogs are the cover pages/approved creatives/graphics from the book project, used with permission from my publishers Leadstart Publishing. For copyright issues the text shall not exceed 500 words and the illustrations used in the book shall not be used here. Hope people reading this blog shall have their interest kindled enough to look out for the book on Amazon/Flipkart. I shall start with the Prologue!
‘PROLOGUE”
Why ‘Stories from Indian Scriptures’?
Though my love of our scriptures is not new, yet, the present, sustained involvement with them started when I started telling bedtime stories to my daughters. These stories would invariably be from either the Ramayana or the Mahabharata. They generated interest, and great wonder, in not only my children, but also my wife, who was an accidental listener, so to say! As this continued over a period of time, I found my own knowledge of the scriptures lacking in depth and proper understanding. Also, I suddenly started to notice that our scriptures are a neglected lot. People don’t read them anymore, we don’t talk about them on a daily basis, don’t use adages or examples from our great epics.
By this time, I had already got a blog going. So, I wrote my first blog on a story from our scriptures, which also forms a chapter of this book, ‘The Cosmic Dance’. The blog was very well received, and earned more appreciation than I had expected. The comments on the blog made me acutely aware of the fact that we know very little of these stories, and so I thought I will put down some of the most well-known stories in a book, and see how it is received by people.
This remains to be seen; however, I do assure my readers thatI have tried to make these as interesting and readable to the modern mind as possible. In doing so, I have, at some places, given a different take on events than one may find in routine texts. In spite of this, the stories retain the same message and the same spirit as in our original texts. At some places, I may have used more color than is required, such as in the description of Shiva or that of Ram, but I do hope the readers will forgive me for this transgression. Being a devotee myself, I could not help but show these characters as larger than life. I have tried to be as truthful and honest with the content and spirit of these stories as possible, yet, I may not have succeeded. I do hope the readers will forgive my inadvertent mistakes, if any, and will still enjoy reading the stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them.
Shri Ram Sharanam.
Link to the book on Amazon India https://www.amazon.in/dp/9352016890?ref=myi_title_dp
Link to the book on Flipkart https://www.flipkart.com/battle-panchavati-other-stories-indian-scriptures/p/itmfgrszzq7mezrv?lid=LSTBOK97893520168916PQLKF&pid=9789352016891
Random Musings 