Mrityunjaya

A very dear friend of mine who is more like an elder sister to me told me once that the one book she absolutely loves is Mityunjaya. She fell in love with that book and has read it several times. I like this woman a lot and I adore her too. I however, have no faith in her intelligence. I do however have faith in her aesthetic sense and her ability to be honest and like things with absoluteness. She is one of the few people who still, is innocent in a refreshing way and she has no cynicism what so ever. After she recommended it, I asked my mother about this book. My mother is a voracious reader. She is a bibliophile. She is a member of two libraries and ends up getting at least 2 novels and a magazine every week, sometimes the number goes to 4 novels and 2 magazines. She majorly reads in marathi – original works and translations, sometimes hindi and always Sidney Sheldon and reader's digest in english. Since Mrityunjaya is a book originally written in marathi, asking my mom's opinion was obvious. She had read it twice when I asked her about it, and didn't remember where her copy of the novel was. I found out that the book had been translated in hindi and english but decided to read it in marathi. Mom got the book from the library for me and thus I began reading the 700 page story of Karna the greatest hero in Mahabharat, second only to Krishna perhaps.

I am a nobody to comment on the book. While reading the book all I did was recommend it to people with whom I shared similar sensibilities. I was proud of discovering this gem of a book and I was being extremely choosy about who I thought was competent enough to appreciate it the way I thought it deserved. It was snobbery of which I am still ashamed of.

Although my mother tongue is marathi and I can read and write it well I still am not as fluent in it as I am in english. I took a really long time completing the novel, which affected my mother's library routine. Even the librarian asked her if she was busy these days because usually she would return books every 2nd week and this time she was taking particularly long. When the librarian was told that it was not my mom but me who was taking so long to finish the book, all the pieces fell into place and the world made sense again to the librarian. Soon enough my mom started complaining about the amount of time I was taking and so I started carrying the book to work just so that I could speed up on my reading. 

So everyday I would reach office and start reading the book and keep it aside every time I was assigned a task. There were days when I would be busy a lot more than I liked and the book would be lying next to the computer. Most of my co-workers would wonder how I could even find the courage to pick up such a thick book. While all this was going on Abhay asked me if I'd mind if he read the book, when I wasn't reading it. Abhay is a an office boys who does all the running around for our office. He must be in his late 30's and has a 16 year old son. I guess he is not so much a boy as he is a man, but thats what the designation is. I said I didn't mind at all and thus we shared the book for a few days. One day I noticed that he had reached nearly the end of the book even though he started much after me. So I asked him about it. He told me that this was his 3rd reading of this novel and this time around he was just revisiting his favourite episodes in the story. He then went on to expound how he had read the book when he was 13 years old and fell in love with it. How he loves all the vivid and detailed descriptions of characters and places and everything else that I had loved about the book.

Its pretty obvious what happened after that. I may be cynical but am not an ostrich. To over simplify the moral of the story – I got rid of my book reading snobbery, I became aware of how the written word is still one of the most accessible and varied mediums of communications across countries, culture, class, caste, SEC etc. And a book taught me the interpretation of how not to judge a book by its cover.