Tag: Ramayana Series

  • Copy, right?

    A while ago, the literary world was in uproar over a certain Kavya. Of course, the same world had put her on a pedestal a few months before that, but it all ended up with the somewhat catty “How Kavya got Dissed…”… her crime was that she had copied lines, okay , paragraphs from other books. well, copied would be a harsh word, she was inspired, or in her own words (pun unintended),had internalised too much of what she read and liked…
    I have just finished the last book of Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series, and although i didnt like it in parts, i enjoyed reading it on the whole.. he has been successful (IMHO) in recreating the saga,and most importantly, made it sound real.. of course i always believe our myths were reality a long time back, but then i have been a sucker for mythology, and had even suffered arun govil and deepika gladly.. 🙂
    Now that we have dealt with the boring prologue, lets deal with my issue. The Ramayana series is not an original piece of work, not if you go by plot, or characters, which to me are important components of any literary work.. but hey, no one is raising any issues with it. is it because the ramayana and mahabharata have already been written by various authors throughout history? and is it because, there is no one to authoritatively speak on behalf of valmiki or veda vyasa and claim these works to be the most obvious examples of copyright infringement?
    Maybe, the difference is that, what Kavya did can be classified as plagiarism, and this cannot be because due credit has been given? But do you think Kavya could even have begun her book if she said that her work was an inspired version of works that had been written earlier? By that logic,aren’t we assuming that M/s Valmiki and Veda Vyasa wouldnt have had a problem with recent authors getting inspired by their works and writing their own versions? And maybe, just maybe, a long time later, in KBC 15, it could happen that someone could lose a lot of money by answering ‘Ashok Banker’ to ‘Who wrote the Ramayana?’

    until next time, who determines the right to copy?
    PS: Having said all that, Mr.Banker’s series is a must read, for those who know the Ramayana, as well as those don’t, for its a story well retold.

  • FAQs

    A couple of weeks back, Sunday Times had a poll, conducted among 1000+ people across India on their beliefs about God, religion, after-life, ghosts and various other things that we think about, on starlit nights…
    I’ve just about finished Book Five of the Ramayana Series, and coincidentally also came across this article, which also raised a few questions on mythology and God…Imagine all the characters that we are so familiar with – Rama, Ravana, Krishna.. were they just characters of imagination or did they actually exist, a long, long time ago, and over a period of time the story of their lives got embellished to such an extent that they became gods and demigods… the amazing similarity between the different myths from civilisations around theworld also point to their actual existence… the remains of Dwaraka, the remains at Mohenjodaro resembling a nuclear holocaust, the drawings of Pushpak – the celestial flying machine, now believed to have been powered by a mercury based fuel, all add to this…
    And thus adds on another set of questions to our FAQs – are our myths based on actual facts, or were they made by the creators of God? the almost eternal question of whether god created man or man created god? but i also believe that it might be just a matter of time before we find the answers.. after all, its only been a few thousand years since we have been around and we had lives before and after the discovery of fire, metals, and even civilisations, and we have managed to find the answer to some questions, and hopefully will learn to tap the resources beyond our five senses sometime in the future…of course, for us, these still remain faqs with several possible answers..

    until next time, if only He had user support…