The Mystic Ranger

I reg­is­tered for this “blog a Pen­guin India Clas­sic”, got the book, and didn’t man­age to com­plete it for nearly two months. That goes nowhere to say how good or bad the book was, but does go to say how cal­lous, dis­tracted and shame­less a per­son I am.

Well, I finally man­aged to read through it, and expec­tantly it was quite mor­al­iz­ing. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of the sotry sec­tions was really inter­est­ing — The first two sec­tions being “Mitral­abha” - gain­ing friends, and “Suhrdb­heda” - split­ting part­ners. The next two sec­tions were — “Vigraha” - war, and “sandhi” - peace.

It is, in clas­sic Hindu nar­ra­tion style, writ­ten in a spi­ral riv­et­ing style, where sto­ries are within sto­ries within other sto­ries. The deep­est chain I could find was of 4 sto­ries going pro­gres­sively deeper. And nearly all the sto­ries’ morals were parts of the shlokas, which had been so adeptly trans­lated by A.N.D Hak­sar, that they even rhymed in Eng­lish (some­thing that never really hap­pened even in their own San­skrit forms…*) It is truly one book to learn from, except for the thing that it is severely dis­crim­i­na­tory — espe­cially against women. It, at places, goes on and on about the dis­loy­alty of women, and that too so explic­itly, you could be sure it was writ­ten by these fat thick-headed chau­vin­ists who were all males but thought they knew all about females, and while dis­clos­ing such “truths”, could be assured no female’s ever gonna read them. That part quite annoyed me, but oth­er­wise, you could actu­ally learn from many sto­ries of it. The basic frame­work is the same as that of the Pan­chatantra, where this knowl­edge­able pundit’s employed to teach this stu­pid Princes the val­ues of life, and the Pun­dit, ingen­u­ously thinks of teach­ing them numer­ous morals in the form of inter­est­ing stories. 

Nev­er­the­less, worth a read, not for the silly sake of know­ing “Indian Cul­ture”, but for imbib­ing some basic truths about life, which range from mak­ing good friends, to being sus­pi­sious of every­body, and not trust­ing the wrong peo­ple, how­ever trust­wor­thy they look.

*I always found this superla­tively hilar­i­ous. Whenever I would ask my San­skrit teacher why the order of the words was so uin­nec­es­sar­ily screwed up in the Shlokas, she’d look at me with these huge eyes express­ing how appalled she felt, and she said — “to rhyme, of course!”. But trust me, a five year stud­ied, such-an-awesome-student-I-actually-got-94-in-my-Sanskrit-boards which are so-huge-that-even-the-Sanskrit-Academy-is-giving-me-this-entirely-generous–schol­ar­ship–of-Rs.300 that less than 1 out of 50 shlokas rhyme, in the Eng­lish sense we know rhyming to mean. I can absolutely not imag­ine mak­ing a cross-language trans­la­tion of a col­lec­tion of lines, and actu­ally make them rhyme, con­sid­er­ing they didn’t rhyme in the first place.