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

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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 ...

What Virat Kohli Could Learn from Sourav Ganguly's Career

This IPL season might be dubbed as 'Kohli's IPL' in years to come. He is unarguably the best exponent of white-ball batsmanship going around. However, for someone like me who places a great emphasis on longest form of Cricket i.e. Test Cricket, until and unless he proves himself in seeming and swinging conditions of England and New Zealand (I believe in him and thus shall wish him luck), I shall still rank him behind Kane Williamson and Joe Root. Just to make sure I'm impartial to this debate, I put my favorite cricketer of all time i.e. Sourav Ganguly behind Sachin, Sehwag, Laxman and Dravid when it comes to rank him in FAB FIVE of Indian Batsmanship because he simply wasn't as good as them in test cricket. Many call him a very good test cricketer and maintaining an average of 40 in test cricket from the very beginning till the very end signifies their reasoning but still, he fell short of 45/50 that makes a batsman statistical behemoth in purest form of Cricket. ...