Skip to main content

Book Review: Ashvamedha

'Ashvamedha' by Aparna Sinha is another meaningful addition to the fine tradition of contemporary Indian writing. It represents a worthy effort to give a spin off to an age-old tale of power-seeking. This is the story of Ashwin Jamwal, an honest IAS officer. His honesty and his dream to bring a change leads to him transferring to other cities. He then realizes that he would have to think of innovative measures to do good. He succeeds in his technique until he gets screwed to an extent that he has to resign. He then joins Politics and becomes quite successful. Instances of dirty politics and corruption are spilled over in the book. The story kicks off at an alarmingly fast pace and is laced with twists in regular intervals to keep the reader engaged. Somewhere midway amidst all the subplots which made sense eventually the pace of the story slackened only to pick up pace again towards the end. The biggest USP of this book is gotta be the topsy-turvy turns it provides in multitudes as a thriller.

On technical fronts, it goes without saying that the books coming from Shristi's stable are excellent and dirt-free. It's blurb is revealing of almost entire plot but sometimes the journey of a writer through the plot-weaving is more cherishing than the end result. Moreover, the readers have become very astute in their guesses of a plot-ending and very few writers manage to pull-off a surprising escape with their climax. Keeping in view with this development of a reader's psyche, this book manages to score impressively on points that define 'thriller' genre.

Ashvamedha has left me wanting for more of this writer in future. Best wishes to Ms. Aparna!!!

I shall assign it a rating of 3.5 out of 5.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Racing Extinction (2015) : A Commentary

It's really hard to switch on to a different language from the one you have constantly been tinkering with. I grew so accustomed to writing in Hindi in last few days that it started dawning on me that I might never be good again with my English. So this is a tester, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, one of my movie group friends, an American by nationality, questioned my fondness of documentaries. I specifically wrote in one of my columns that documentaries demand your unwavering attention and once you gave 'that' to them, you are rewarded much more handsomely than a proper, narrative, fictitious film. My reasoning for believing so is that a documentary is an experience of a creative process. It doesn't get made to 'entertain' you. They are there to reveal something to you. They teach you something. You get overwhelmed by them. 'Racing Extinction (2015)' was one such documentary. I watched it in last couple of days. I couldn't complete it in one ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Love and Friendship

Friendship is an aspect of life that’s not controlled by its beholders. Ideal friendships, well they are the things of past now. Many a times we have seen our parents or their parents talking about their old great friends and how amusingly they tell us about their bonding, the moments they spent together and we see a ‘priceless’ twinkle in their eyes…..that’s something which is missing from modern friendships. There are terms & phrases like ‘yaar tu to apna bhai hai’, ‘yaar tu to ghar ka aadmi hai’ which even today invoke something very beautiful inside our hearts but we all know that the feelings underneath them are ‘hollow’, they are just mere words, ‘emotionless’ and ‘impassive’. Well who am I to comment on such an indefinable ‘qualitative’ perspective? I’m one of you, those wretched creatures that are still in need of true, great friendships. Well I certainly can’t say that I haven’t got friends. I’ve got friends, plenty of them in fact, and some of them are real great. I s...
1 comment
Read more

Book Review: Unanswered

'Unanswered' is a book penned by Mr. Kunal Uniyal and it's his third book. I am calling it a book, using a common noun to describe it and I have a good enough reason for doing so. It's a book that consists off both poems and prose and I was in real dilemma picturing its prognosis in my mind. It started with a poem named 'You and I' and beautiful it was, all poised and lyrical. And then came a snippet of a prose by the name 'Life of a Yogi'. They were really not connected and I was perplexed. Then I allowed myself some comfort and decided to dig up some more. Some more beautiful poems and accompanying yet again not quite related passages of prose followed but now they looked more in shape and very much in order. Now I was beginning to realize that there was more to this book than met my eyes earlier and it's scope is much wider that what I originally thought. You are required to engage yourself with this book and once you do that, you will know you ar...
Post a Comment
Read more