The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

So, I stumbled upon this book while searching for the Booker prize winners. I found the name of Margaret Atwood who is very popular as a poet and novelist. I was planning to read the other novel by her first which is "The Handmaid's Tale" but I'm going to keep it for later.

I'll also like to add that this is not a full fledged novel but a short novel or a long story as you can call it. Technically, they call it novella. I realized this in the middle of my reading because I was through with half of the book in like an hour. This is a problem with reading ebooks that sometimes you don't know how long this is going to be because I don't count the number of pages. Though, I thought I could have when I was reading my previous book "The Hindus".

Any ways, the book is not really a story but it is a narrative from Penelope's point of view who was the wife of Odysseus. I hope you are able to connect it with Odyssey. The narrative revolves around the twelve maids of Penelope and how they were hanged in the end without any proper reason. There is a whole reasoning of disloyalty etc in Odyssey but here it is given from Penelope's point of view.

There was no sequel of Odyssey which glorifies the female characters so this one is from a woman for a woman.

The whole story is around what all Penelope had gone through during the absence of Odysseus. It's rendered beautifully and it raises the question of freedom that a woman has versus a freedom that a man enjoys. Odysseus was gone for long years for Trojan war and he has a long list of adventures after that with witches, ogres and gods. Odyssey has details of his sleeping in the arms of beautiful maidens and goddesses but when he comes back after all these years first thing he was worried about was the chastity of his wife.

Why the whole epic glorifies his relations with other woman but very conservative about the conduct of Penelope? She doesn't have the freedom to do what she wants to do. If she does she will be labelled as a whore. May be she would have been hanged or brutally killed for that. Why chastity is a woman's virtue and she is judged on this scale so rigidly with zero tolerance?

There were no times when a woman was really glorified. We may find some deviations but they will be very rare. They are so rare that you can count them on fingers.

The saddest part is that there is no change in this perception of a woman, she is either objectified (like the maidens of Odyssey whom the Odysseus enjoys) or scrutinized for her loyalty/chastity/whatever-makes-a-man-feel-better.

I hope that one day we all have the freedom to live with dignity and make the choices that we want to make and do not follow what others have decided for us.

This is a pretty good read and it questions the very mindset of a society.

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger

This is the book which took me about four months to finish and the credit goes to my latest muse a 30 inch long bamboo flute. I never gave up reading for anything but this was just out of this world.

Anyway, I finally finished this book and I have mixed feelings about it.

I'll start with reason why I started reading it in the first place, and the one word for it is "controversy". When I heard of it being taken back by publisher I was curious to know what objectionable content does this book has.

Now, the question is what I think about it. Most important point is that it doesn't have anything objectionable. It is a plain factual (there are some facts and some mythology) book which dwells upon a lot of points but doesn't establish a single one of them. I believe this is by choice of author and not because she lost the plot in between. Second thing is that the questions raised in the book have been raised many times earlier from different people, and we all can discuss over it all our lifetime without reaching a conclusion as why a particular thing was said or done.

The most important factor is that we move on. We move on with a new knowledge from our past. Something which makes us proud and humble together. We acknowledge what others have said and done with a freedom of agree to disagree.

We may not agree to everything but that doesn't mean that everything which is against our conventional wisdom is untrue,

I believe there was always a trend to raise the non reason-ability in various religions, conventions and institutions. All we need is just a rationality to understand the thoughts without any bias.

Finally, this book is a good read but don't read it just for the controversy it created (like I started reading it) but to see a different face of religion and culture in India, Specially, there are a lot of anecdotes which you may find funny or bizarre. This girl (she is 75 year young) spent five decades of her life to learn Indian culture, and she is worth listening.