Robin's Reviews: Monkeying Around Pt. II

So, I'm not going to call them rapid anymore. They always end up longer than I intended (I really need to go back to writing these in Word ahead of time so's I can edit them before they go up) and this one doesn't even have the excuse of two reviews at once. Even so, this may be my shortest review yet.

The book-
The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic by R.K. Narayan

The Review-
Don't read it.

You say that's not a review? Okay, fine, but don't blame me if this gets wordy. Although they've shortened an enormous epic into about 160 pages, it's just not very interesting. Even as an amateur folklorist I sort of yawned my way through. See, from the moment of his birth, Rama, an avatar of the preserver god Vishnu is basically Ancient Indian Superman. He's calm and wise and handsome and completely invincible and everybody loves him. Nothing is a challenge for him, which makes it hard to relate. The main story doesn't really kick in until half way through and it should have been solved instantly, but the ONLY mistake Rama ever makes drags the story out for a hundred more pages. Meanwhile, I find him to be a huge jerk. He lets his wife get kidnapped by a nearly omnipotent demon who's got the hots for her and then accuses her of being unfaithful to him months later when he finally gets off his ass and rescues her. What a guy. Mr. Perfect Justice over there who everyone loves. Did I mention he murders, in a very cowardly way, I might add, the rightful ruler of this kingdom of intelligent, magical monkies in order to install a puppet ruler to gain allies he doesn't even need but who march to the death on his behalf because he and his brother kick down their doors and threaten them if they don't help? Yeah. All that stuff about how kind and wonderful he is wears a little thin when this sort of thing happens. Indeed, the only good to come out of any of that was Hanuman, one of those Monkies. He's hilarious. He gets sent on a scouting mission, gets captured, and they try and light him on fire but he escapes and burns the entire demon city to the ground. Oh, and what was Rama doing? Pining. Hanuman for the win! Also: Hanuman was very directly the inspiration for Sun Wukong, the monkey in Journey to the West.

Also, without going into the whole of Hindu mythology, you've probably heard of the basic three gods of their pantheon. Brahma is the creator, but he's seen as a well intentioned idiot and isn't actually very important in their mythos. The real powers are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. That might sound like Shiva is the "evil" one but in actuality he's more like the personification of entropy. And since they see the world as horribly flawed, it needs to be broken down piece by piece, examined, and then the gods can try it again. So it's a vital function. The whole epic is basically a propoganda piece for the cult Vishnu though, so it's basically spitting in Shiva's face every three sentences. I'm not cool with that because frankly, Shiva's more interesting. Did you know that his most devout supporters are young women? Or that one of is symbols is very phallic looking and that those some young women will climb ladders and pour buckets of milk over twenty foot high stone statues of said symbol? Also he has blue skin and dances the dance OF DOOM. I think that would've made a better story, don't you?

Anyway, join me next time for the start of a series I've been meaning to do for a while about Media entrepreneurship.