The Wall Street Journal writes on the new comic books created by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Deepak Chopra, and Shekhar Kapur

It’s a key scene in “Devi,” a new comic book that’s part of an ambitious effort by a unit of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Ltd. to develop story lines based on Indian religion and mythology. Others take inspiration from the Sanskrit epic poem Ramayana and traditional legends such as one involving snakes that can take human form.

The company, Virgin Comics LLC, has also teamed to develop other story lines with a broad range of individuals, including John Woo, director of “Mission: Impossible 2,” and Guy Ritchie, the film director. In November actor Nicolas Cage agreed to star in a movie based on one of the new comics, “The Sadhu” — which describes the adventures of a British man who discovers he was a sadhu (Hindu holy man) in a previous life. Deepak Chopra, the author of self-help books, will write the screenplay.

The goal: Capitalize on the current vogue for all things Indian as well as the success of Asian comics in the West in recent years.[Holy Heroes of Indian Lore, Batman!]

Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Robert D. Kaplan, Vintage edition (November 27, 2001), 304 pages

Most people think that the decline of Afghanistan started with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, but it was not the case. On April 27, 1978, Nur Mohammed Taraki, a self-declared Marxist came to power in a coup. Following examples showed by illustrious Communists like Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot, they executed 27,000 political prisoners in the Pul-i-Charki prison located six miles east of Kabul. They enforced land reforms and extended secular education to the villages, but the way it was done was so brutal that even the Soviets were alarmed. The mujahidin revolt  and the refugee exodus to Pakistan was triggered  by this Communist land reform and was the first instance of organized repression in Afghanistan’s history according to Robert Kaplan.

Kaplan, who is currently the editor of Atlantic Monthly wrote the book by traveling with the Mujahidin into Afghanistan in the 1980s while they were fighting against the Soviet Army. This war largely went unreported according to him. None of the American TV networks had a bureau for the war in which the Communists killed 1.3 million people which is more than the deaths in the Iran-Iraq war and ten times the number killed in Lebanon in all years of civil conflict there. Kaplan quotes a Swedish nurse who lived through some fierce fighting in north Afghanistan saying that every day in her short-wave radio she would hear about people killed in South Africa, Lebanon and Sri Lanka, but there was no mention of Afghanistan.

It was not easy for Kaplan to cover this war as well. While on jeep between Quetta and Khandahar driving in a desert  he hears the drone of a Soviet aircraft. Kaplan panics and asks his driver about it. The driver without any signs of nervousness says that the plane is an Antonov transporting troops and they don’t bomb. As they reach the Arghandab River Valley, he meets Ismael Gailani, a commander while mortars are raining all around. One of the mortars land about a hundred feet away throwing dust into his tea. All this time the Mujahidin sat around him relaxed, smiling and impassive.
Continue reading “Book Review: Soldiers of God” →

National Public Radio  and local affiliates like KQED in San Francisco and WHYY in Philadelphia bring some of the best interviews and discussions you can hear in American Media. Here are some interviews worth listening. (Click on the Listen button on the page)

• Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban on Fresh Air
• What Mathematicians do. If you want to understand Poincaré conjecture and the beauty of pi, then listen to this.
• Rajeev Chandrasekharan, on his new book about life in the Green Zone in Baghdad
• Nobel laureate Jospeh Stiglitz on Globalization.
• Historian  Niall Ferguson talks about the wars in the 20th century.

The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism by A.L.Basham, Oxford University Press, USA, 208 pages

Excluding the first chapter which contains the preliminary narrative, the Bhagavad Gītā contains 650 verses. A sloka takes at least twelve seconds to narrate which means that if Krishna spoke without a pause it would have taken him over two hours to complete his sermon to Arjuna. Considering the fact that a great war about to commence it seems unlikely that the entire Bhagavad Gītā as we know it today was delivered by Krishna on the battle field according to A.L.Basham.

Basham, known more popularly for his work, The Wonder That Was India was a  historian with the Australian National University in Canberra.  He was considered as an important scholar on ancient Indian culture and religion.

Coming back to the lack  of proportion in Gītā, Basham says that Arjuna’s quandary is settled within the 38th verse of the second chapter, but still Krishna turns to other matters which are irrelevant to the main theme. The rest of the the Gita was added later, at least by two hands. One of them was a philosopher of the Upanisisadic type interested in the Brahman and the other was a theist, a devotee of Vishnu.

His theory comes by the analysis of a later interpolation into the Mahabharata known as Anugita which occurs in the seventeenth book, the Asvamedha Parvan. At that time the war is over and Arjuna reminds Krishna of what he taught him in the battle field and admits that he has forgotten Krishna’s words. Krishna talks again about Brahman, early forms of Samkhya and Yoga philosophy, but there is no reference to bhakti or Krishna’s divinity from which Basham concludes that the Anugita was inserted into the Mahabharata when Bhagavad Gītā was devoid of its theistic passages.

He has many other revelations as well. For him there was no trace of Hinduism in the Indus Valley Civilization which is where the book starts. The pashupathi seal  which shows a horned god sitting in a yogic posture known as utkatikasana, discovered in Mohenjo-daro according to many resemble a proto-Shiva, but not for Basham. The full face of the god is closer to a tiger than a man and it is not clear if the god is ithyphallic.  He also dismisses evidence for ritual temple prostitution and the inducements of calm or trance states called yoga as dubious. 

Instead the beginnings of religion for him started between 1500 and 900 B.C.E when the Rg-veda was composed – not by indigenous people, but by Aryans who entered India after the decline of the Indus cities. The authors of the hymns could not have been the residents of the Indus civilization for they do not make any mention of those cities. Also, the Vedic hymns mention horses which did not exist in Indus cities. He does not wonder why the authors of the Rg-veda mention life on the shore of sapta-sindhu rivers even though they arrived in the region after two of the rivers had dried up.

Unlike the Eminent Historians, Basham finds various admirable concepts in Hinduism. He notes various theories on the creation of evolution of the universe as wondered by Cyrus Spitama in Gore Vidal’s Creation, like the Golden Embryo (Hiranyagarbha) from which the universe emanated according to the Rig-Veda. Basham is very impressed with the development of thought in Vedic literature and mentions Rg-Veda (10.129) for its picture of the universe evolving out of the primal condition that was neither being nor nonbeing, neither cosmos nor chaos. This hymn according to him is the oldest expression of philosophic doubt in the literature of the world and forms a landmark in the history of Indian thought.

Besides these he also notes the Purusasukta (Rg-veda 10.90) which is beautiful from a literary point of view as well as a verse found in Brhadaranya Upanishad (1.4) which informs us that the mating of Purusa and Viraj produced a second Purusa and then the Gods. In Brhadaranya Upanishad he also finds new accounts for the theory on creation which ascribes primacy to Death, Brahman and a personal self showing the richness and variety of Upanisadic literature. 

In Brhadaranya Upanishad (3.2) the sage Yajnavalkya comes to the court of King Janaka of Videha (northern Bihar) and he is questioned by another sage, Jaratkarava Artabhaga on what happens to a man after his death. Yajnavalkya does not answer it in public, but  they both walk alone and talk to each other and Jaratkarava becomes silent. What Yajnavalkya told him was the theory of transmigration of the soul which was held in secret initially, but later was made public.

This concept alongwith the ideas of samsara and karma were all products of great intellectual thought according to Basham. These concepts of transmigration and karma was adopted by heterodox leaders like the Buddha and Mahavira as well. Other concepts introduced by the ascetics include the atman and the Brahman and he is fascinated by a debate on if the absolute and ultimate entity is “without characteristics” (nirguna) or “with characteristics” (saguna).

Basham also questions the Marxist theories which connect the rise of heterodoxies such as Buddhism and Jainism as a revolt against the class system. According to him, Brahmins formed the largest group of both monks and lay supporters of Buddhism. In its early form Buddhism appealed mainly to intellectuals and rulers and very few members of the lower orders supported it.

Besides the Vedic literature, Basham is impressed with the two epics as well. He thinks that there was nothing religious in the Mahabharata originally, but religious content was added later by the Brahmins. Seeing the popularity of the original poem, the Brahmins took over the transmission of it from the royal bards and crudely sandwiched many doctrinal, mythological and theological passages into it. He blames the gotra of the Bhargavas for this crime. In fact the original poem did not even have Krishna according to him.

While most of us believe that Ramayana is older than Mahabharata since Rama is the seventh avatar and Krishna the eight, Basham says it need not be so. According to him the list of avatars was produced much later than either books. Also there is evidence that Mahabharata was finally edited in 500 C.E and by that time Ramayana was well known and was interpolated into Mahabharata. He also thinks that Mahabharata had a rugged beauty without high finish or intellectual style while Ramayana was the work in ornate and classical style of Sanskrit.

Basham traces the religious and philosophical life of India from the Indus Valley civilization to the crystallization of classical Hinduism in the first centuries. This book is short and on a flight from San Francisco to Washington D.C. this book can be completed in the time the flight goes over Denver. Basham’s writing echoes the theories of the eminent historians and considering the fact that he was the the doctoral guide for the likes of Romila Thapar, it is not a surprise.

The book is available in the varnam book store

Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All by Perry Garfinkel, Harmony (June 13, 2006), 336 pages

When Perry Garfinkel was granted an interview with the Dalai Lama in Dharmashala, he wanted an to start with an expensive ice-breaker. So Perry first went to Xining, the capital of the Chinese Province of Qinghai which was near to the village where the Dalai Lama was born. There he met Gongbu Tashi, the Dalai Lama’s nephew and got a message recorded from him for his uncle. Later when Perry met Dalai Lama, he played the message for him.

The meeting with Dalai Lama was the final part of his 10 week journey to understand why Buddhism is growing in popularity around the world. Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in United States, after Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He also wanted to understand why an idea 2500 years old is still relevant today and if Buddhism can help solve many of the world’s problems. For this, he travels on assignment from National Geographic to the place where Buddhism originated and is still practiced like Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Japan, France and  United States.

One reason why Buddhism has become relevant is because it is active in social causes. In Nagpur, India he meets Dalits who have been converted to Buddhism by Ambedkar. He cites this as an example of a new Buddhist movement based on social equality and as a rejection of the oppressive caste system. He also meets Dr. Narendra Jadhav, a Dalit convert and principal adviser in the Department of Economic Analysis and Policy for the Reserve Bank of India who says that one of the benefits of  the conversion is that now they can give their children names like Siddharth and Pradnya instead of Dagoo and Kacharu.

In Sri Lanka he meets Dr. A.T.Ariyaratne, the founder of Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, a political organization at a grassroots level that is Buddhist based. In Thailand he finds the group International Network of Engaged Buddhists and also monks involved in preventing illegal logging.  Like how water takes shape of the container, Garfinkel discovers that Buddhism fits into the cultural vessel of each country to which it has migrated. In Thailand he goes to Wat Bang Phra where he meets a monk who is into religious tattoos and various other people who are into Buddhist art. In the Shaolin Temple in China he meets monks who practice martial arts and in Japan he meets Buddhist calligraphers.

It is not just in social movements that Buddhism has made its mark. In Tihar jail he meets prisoners who have undergone transformation after practicing vipassana, a meditation technique practiced in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism.  In United States clinical patients have reported decreases in physical and psychological symptoms by practicing Buddhist meditation.

Buddhism has popularity among people of other religion as well. Garfinkel and his friends belong an American sect called Bu-Jews. They are Jews who practice Buddhism and about 30 percent of the American Buddhists are of Jewish Background. It is in San Francisco that Garfinkel meets Wes  Nisker, who claims that he is the world’s first Buddhist stand-up. One of his lines is – “Before I became a Buddhist, I worried about my life”. Pause. “Now I worry about my next life”.

There have been valuable contributions from people belonging to other religions in making it popular. The meditation technique which the Buddha practiced, vipassana, was lost to the world, until it was bought back to India from Burma by S.N.Goenka, a Hindu. In Worcester in United States, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted vipassana to help non spiritualists and called it Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program (MBSR) and now it is offered all around the country by various hospitals.

Though Buddhism originated in India and reached all around the world, Garfinkel now sees instances of cross pollination where Buddhism has benefited from ideas in the West. In Hong Kong, he meets a Chinese clinical psychologist named Helen Ma who took an eight-week intensive training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in Worcester and took it back to her country. In Thailand he meets monks who bought back contemplative education from Naropa University in Colorado to Bangkok and in India he meets Shantum Seth, Vikram Seth’s brother who discovered Buddhism in California and now conducts Buddhist tours in India.

While Buddhism took roots easily in some countries, in countries like China there was a conscious effort to control and restrict Buddhist activities. With the Cultural revolution, violent suppression of Buddhism was one of the goals which resulted in the Dalai Lama taking refuge in India. Instead of Buddha’s four noble truths, Chairman Mao offered his own truths in the Little Red Book called Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung which included gems like truth no (2) the minority is subordinate to the majority and (3) the lower level is subordinate to the higher level. Probably under due to fear, the Chinese people whom Garfinkel meets say that there is religious harmony in China as if they have never heard of what is happening in Tibet.

He also notices various ironies within the movement. In Deeksha Bhoomi in Nagpur, while among the Dalit converts, he notices a woman squatting and cleaning the floor who is ignored by everyone. While the Dalit converts wish each other as Jai Bhim, the woman responds with Namaste for which she is chided as it is an address entrenched in Hindu values with which they don’t want any ties. In Thailand he meets Sulak Sivaraksa, founder of International Network of Engaged Buddhists who goes on criticizing Goenka,  Thich Nhat Hanh and Hinduism. In Sri Lanka he meets Buddhists who are at war against the Tamil Tigers and learns that the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Solomon Bandaranaike, was assassinated by Talduwe Somarama, a Buddhist monk.

Perry Garfinkel has an good sense of humor. He is also very cynical. But for a person who has been involved with spiritual movements since the 70s he shows an utter lack of knowledge of Hinduism. In Mumbai he stays with two close disciples of S.N.Goenka who have been practitioners of vipassana. After their discussion of the practice, the husband Rohit shows Perry, idols of various Hindu gods to whom he prays. “Once a Hindu, always a Hindu”, he generalizes as if it is a contradiction.

The book filled with interesting anecdotes is an easy read and gives a quick report on various Buddhist movements around the world. It also shows how Buddhism is adapting itself to be relevant in the 21st century, but still I could not figure why it was titled “Buddha or Bust”.
Listen: Perry Garfinkel on KQED Forum

In Search of the Cradle of Civilization by Georg Fuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, Quest Books (September 2001), 341 pages.

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta noticed that there were striking similarities in the vocabulary  and grammar of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Gothic. This discovery resulted in the creation of a new field called comparative linguistics which led scholars to believe that all these languages were derived from a pre-Indo-European language which had its origins somewhere in Northern Europe, Central Asia, Southern Russia, India or Anatolia.

Soon we got the Aryan Invasion Theory, which claimed that Aryans, barbaric semi nomadic tribes who spoke the Indo-European language invaded India and then composed the Vedas. A date of between 1500 – 1200 B.C.E was also proposed for the invasion.  The word Aryan comes from Sanskrit language and means “noble” or “cultured” and does not refer to a particular race or language The whole Aryan Invasion Theory is scholarly fiction according to authors Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley and they present both literary and archaeological evidence for it.

The literary history is provided by the Vedic literature from the Rig-Veda to the Upanishads. The Vedic Aryans were not just cattle and sheep breeding semi nomadic pastoralists, but city dwellers, seafarers and merchants whose business took them along the length of Saraswati, Indus and also into the ocean.  In the ancient scriptures there is no reference to a five river system, but to a seven river system which was called sapta-saindhava (land belonging to seven rivers) and the center of the vedic times was not Punjab, but some place further east on the Saraswati.

Satellite images have shown evidence of paleo channels  in Haryana believed to be this mythical Saraswati. According to geologists, before 1900 B.C.E, Saraswati had shifted course at least four times. Then major tectonic shifts occurred which altered the flow of the river resulting in  the eventual drying. Following this people migrated to the Ganges valley which is described in the Shatapata Brahmana.

Following the archaeological discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, hundreds of other sites were discovered in the region like Ganweriwala, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, Kalibangan and Lothal. The Harappan culture area far exceeded the combined area occupied by the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations and has provided various seals of significance. This civilization declined around 1900 B.C.E and the cause is attributed to climate change or the disappearance of substantial portions of the Ghaggar Hakra river system.

The authors argue that the people of Harappa were Vedic Aryans who had reached India a long time back. Indo-European speakers are now thought to have been present in Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolothic age. Migrations would have happened during the Harappan times as well, but the new immigrants would have found a prominent Sanskrit speaking Vedic people in Harappa. It is possible that the Vedic people walked on the streets of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa and even possibly Mehrgarh and they did not come as conquerors or destroyers from outside India, but lived and even built the cities in the Land of Seven Rivers.

There are reasons to believe that the Rig-Veda was composed much before Muller’s imaginary date. The authors  claim that some of the oldest hymns of Rig-Veda were composed before the decline of Saraswati.  According to them, Rig-Veda fills the gap between the Neolithic town of Mehrgarh and the Indus-Saraswati civilization. One of the stellar patterns suggested by the hymns of the Rig Veda could only have occurred in the period from 4500 – 2500 B.C.E. Still Max Muller quite arbitarily came up with a date of 1500 – 1200 B.C.E for the Vedas and it has been repeated constantly by various historians. The Rig Veda speaks about the seven rivers and if they were composed by people who came from outside in 1500 B.C.E, then they would not have known about the two vanished rivers.

Among the artifacts obtained from the Indus-Saraswati region is the pashupathi seal named so after the Hindu God Shiva. The seal shows a seated figure, in a yogic posture, with headgear surrounded by animals. Rudra/Shiva is the most prominent deity of the Yajur Veda and this links the Harappan religion with Vedic texts. Polished stones which look like the linga and recently the swastika was also found in Indus Valley.  Numerous clay figurines have been found in Harappa which show a Mother Godess cult and Godesses are common in Hinduism even now.

There is also evidence of tree worship in Harappan times as mentioned in Rig Veda and Atharva Veda. The core of the Vedic religion was sacrifice and fire altars have been found in several Indus sites. In Kalibangan seven rectangular fire altars have been found aligned north-south beside a well which parallels the six Vedic dishnya hearths. With all the evidence the authors conclude that the Vedic and Indus-Saraswati civilization is one and the same and Rig-Veda and other sacred hymns were the product of the people who created the urban civilization of the Land of the Seven Rivers.

According to the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory Aryans came and conquered the dark skinned Dasyus. In Sanskrit dasa means servant and could have been the opposite of the Aryans. The battle between the Aryans and Dasyus could be a metaphor for the fight between light and darkness like the struggle between the Egyptian God Ra and the demons of darkness or the Zoroastrian conflict between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. This reference which appears once in the entire Vedic literature became the cornerstone for the Aryan invasion theory. The Dasyus were not Dravidians or non-Aryans, but fallen Aryans or members of the warrior class who had become unspiritual. Arya and dasyu are terms not describing race, but behavior.

Some of their arguments are not that convincing. For example, they cite that priesthood played an important part of Harappans and similarly emphasis on priesthood is found in Vedic literature and hence Harappa was v
edic. Priesthood was an important part of Egyptians, and Zoroastrians as well. The authors believe that Indo-European peoples were at least present in Mehrgarh or that they could be the creators. This belief comes not from any archaeological evidence, but from the assumption that some hymns of Rig Veda could go back to the fourth millennium B.C.E. They even state that literary evidence is more important than archaeological evidence.  In one case they go even as far as suggesting that ancient Egyptians got their wisdom from the sages of India since there was a colony of Indic people in Memphis around 500 B.C.E.

Recently there was a program on The History Channel titled, The Exodus Decoded, which tried to provide a scientific explanation to the Exodus and the ten plagues that struck Egypt. The Smithsonian of May 2006 has an article titled Mideast Archaeology: The Bible as a road map which talks about how an archaeologist identified a structure in West Bank which is believed to have been built by Joshua on instructions from Moses. In both these cases the Bible has been taken as a valid historical document and then archaeology was conducted to validate it. Today Biblical Archaeology is a scientific discipline in its own right.

When it comes to ancient Indian scriptures like the Vedas, scholars are not that lenient. They have always chosen to see in them literary creations of little more than mythological and theological significance. While they contain theology and mythology, it also reveals the names of rivers, astronomical information and gives geographical descriptions which could be valuable clues for historians. It gives us a glimpse of the world in which the authors of the Vedas lived. This book brings into attention many interesting pieces of information from various fields to make a strong case for the antiquity of Indic civilization and is highly recommended.
Note: This book is available from the varnam Book Store

National Public Radio  and local affiliates like KQED in San Francisco  bring some of the best interviews and discussions you can hear in American Media. Here are some interviews worth listening.

• Perry Garfinkel, author of Buddha or Bust: In  Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All
• Steven Kotler, author of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief
• Airline Security: A look at the airline security and screening measures that have been put in place since 9/11 and how those might change in response to  London terror threat.
  
• Science writer Marcus Chown talks about the never ending universe.
• Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe and Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble With Physics talk about String Theory

Did you know that Al-Qaeda members had medical benefits and paid holidays. They had to submit requests in triplicate to get new tires or other hardware? Lawrence Wright wrote this new book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 taking almost five years and interviewing more than 600 people including members of Al-Qaeda and Osama’s wives. It also talks about the effort of FBI agents to crack down on them.

The arrival, then, of Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower,” a deeply researched history of al Qaeda, is welcome and timely. This is a largely Egyptian and Saudi tale, one that Mr. Wright intercuts with the stories of the small group of U.S. officials who early on understood the threat posed by the group. Mr. Wright focuses on the decisions made by certain individuals rather than on the play of great impersonal forces. At one point he considers “whether 9/11 or some other similar tragedy might have happened without [Osama] bin Laden to steer it.” His answer: “Certainly not. The tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of the contest.”

One of those individuals was Sayyid Qutb, a nebbishy Egyptian writer who arrived in Greeley, Colo., in 1946 to attend college. A priggish intellectual, Qutb found the U.S. to be racist and sexually promiscuous, an experience that left him with a lifelong contempt for the West. “Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized,” Mr. Wright says. Once in Egypt again, Qutb joined the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and was later jailed and tortured.[Profiles in Terror (subscription reqd.)]

Sayyid Qutb wrote a manifesto called Milestones which became a jihadi primer. Sayyid also wanted jihad to be conducted against Muslim nations which did not implement Shariat. Note that this all started much before the Palestine, Kashmir  and so many other issues which jihadi apologists claim as excuse.

The book traces the career of Osama from his days fighting the Soviets which was greatly exaggerated to his exile in Sudan where he spent time farming sunflowers to the plotting of 9/11 with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The book also profiles Daniel Coleman and FBI debriefer who in 1996 concluded that Al-Qaeda was a big threat to United States and John O’Neill, another FBI agent who aggressively investigated the bombing of USS Cole in Yemen.

Listen: Lawrence Wright on Fresh Air

Creation: A Novel by Gore Vidal , Doubleday, 592 pages

Sometime in the 5th century BCE, the Persian Emperor Darius summons Cyrus Spitama,  a friend of his son Xerxes, and grandson of Zoroaster and commands him to be his envoy to India. At that time Persia was the superpower in the world and Darius had an empire extending from Turkey in the West to Bactria in the East.

The Greek Wars were going on and the Persian Emperor needed money to pay for the work he was doing in Persepolis and for the defense of the northern frontier. Darius wanted Cyrus to  make trade alliances, analyze the nature of Indian states and make plans to add all of India to the Persian empire. He had heard that India had lot of iron and wanted to control the mines to make his fortune. He also had got a message from King Bimbisara of Magadha for a trade alliance.

Thus Cyrus starts his journey on a ship from the delta of Tigris and Euphrates to the port of Patalene (somewhere in present day Sindh). Cyrus was a good choice as the ambassador for he knew Mathematics and had the ability to learn new languages. He was a seven year old child in Bactria with Zoroaster when Turanians murdered  the founder of Zoroastrianism. Since Darius was a follower of Zoroastrianism, Cyrus was treated with respect in his palace.

Besides having an interest in traveling, Cyrus was also concerned about the moment of creation. According to Zoroaster, the Wise Lord created an evil twin Ahriman. Once people are dead, the soul would cross the bridge of the redeemer and those who have followed Truth would go to the house of good mind and happiness and those who followed Ahriman would go to the house of Lie and suffer torment. The question then was why did the Wise Lord create evil? Why didn’t he create a blissful world full of just happiness? Cyrus meets some very interesting personalities of the Axial age like, Buddha, Mahavira, Gosala, and Confucius to debate these issues.

Cyrus passes through Mathura where he meets Gosala, a leader of a group of Ajivikas. Gosala tells him that living a virtuous life does not speed up freedom from rebirths and one has to live the cycle of life from beginning to end. Cyrus moves to Varanasi where he meets Mahavira (a short thick man with a high compelling voice). According to him the cycles of creation ends and begins again and since this goes on without any ending, it has no beginning as well. Mahavira and Gosala had been like brothers and later they parted ways.
Continue reading “Book Review: Creation: A Novel” →