4.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Reading!!, March 28, 2002
This review is from: Unicorn Expedition: 2 (Hardcover)
Prof. Shanku,the simple-living-high-thinking scientist from a place called Giridi in Northern India sets out for this adventure in Tibet .
With him is his scientist friends Jeremi Sonders from UK and Wilhelm Crole from Germany and the hilarious neighbour Abinash babu.They have another companion with them who turned out to be not a gentleman as he pretended.
The group ended on landing in a very remote place in Tibet by whatever geographical information they had --ultimately they reach a place called "Nandan Kanan" -which is the "paradise on earth" and behind a huge wall.You can't take back anything from here to the real world. The bad man ,Marcovitch is finally brought to justice here.
Graphic details of Tibet,exciting events,comic touches here and there and above all a scintillating story keeps you engrossed all the time .This book is simply unputdownable.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Indeed An Experience, January 14, 2006
This review is from: Unicorn Expedition: 2 (Hardcover)
This collection of short stories is a perfect companion to any imaginative mind seeking exotic tales from Southern Asia - tales of men turning into snakes and birds that grow twice the size of normal human beings - and is coherent while also enticing. Most of the stories are narratives, and though each has an individual approach to an aberrant experience, human sentiment is present throughout every story, thus making them believable to even the most logic-minded individual. The fables are saturated with morals and virtues that exemplify universal values, though they also appropriately play with petty human conflicts in order to enable the reader to relate closely to each lesson learned. For example, in "Kanga", a murderer of a holy snake becomes one himself in the end, and curiosity indeed kills the cat and superstition drives the sane insane, while in "Pato Babu, Film Star", a retired actor is degraded by a small bit part, and the lack of words in his role teaches how one must make the most of situations, and derive his own personal satisfaction from them. Perhaps this anthology is a "human" in itself - a collection of experiences that do not tie together blatantly, but when morals are thought about and themes derived, can be molded into one, as humans are made up of hundreds and thousands of experiences merged together.
The reading of this short story collection was a worthwhile experience, and was done swiftly as the language is simple, and cultural references not heavily used, so that a reader oblivious to Indian culture could understand and be charmed by the stories too. I learned much about the shared Indian mentality of differing time periods, and was happy to know that values presented in The Bhagavad Gita could be applied to every course of action in each story. I also enjoyed the anthology because it was not a book based solely on logic; on the contrary, it was built much upon serendipity and fate, while the clairvoyant wisdom that the characters seemed to have in each situation gave the stories a unique twist. Its literary strengths were the fact that each story had a clear and consistent theme, setting, plot and tone, and when Indian words were used, a glossary helped to further clarify references. Its weaknesses lay in the fact that the stories had close to no correlation, and could not be classified under any other genre except "myths" or "fables" - the settings and human responses alike may have been realistic, though there is hardly any place for this analogy in core studies of Indian culture, religion or politics.
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