The Oath of the Vayuputras by Amish TripathiMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
The series started off as a re-telling of the story of Indian God Shiva and the first book of the trilogy stood close to its intention by having some basic facts right and very nicely relatable to the Legend (Kailash/Somras/NeelKanth and especially the famous Har Har Mahadev). The second book deviated a bit from the Legend we know by defining a tribe called Nagas which were evil. In the first part I assumed Nagas were just "created" to account for the famous snake around the God's throat but in the second book he added so much story to them that it looked like he deviated a lot from the Ancient version(I never heard of a huge Naga tribe in any of our tales. It would have been much better if he defined them Asuras but that's a whole different thing) but I liked how he built the character of Ganesh and his relationship with Shiva and Sati.
The biggest disappointment (in keeping with the way he diluted the story more in each book) is the third one where the real intention of retelling the "God" stature to these bunch of great men from the past was so far from its purpose that he explains away the present form of Ganesh we remember, the fact that Karthik is a huge god in the south and even the way we remember Bhagiratha only in the last 2 pages in a 600 page book! He even tries to sneak in the Shakti Peethas in the last lines of the book as being established by Shiva/his sons!
He ended up treating this book as the end of a Fantasy series like LOTR by concentrating more on War strategies / Wars instead of making it a retelling of Indian Epics. You only see familiar names from Epics but they do not do a single thing you expect them to do if you know the stories. Even by concentrating on "never-heard-in-Indian-Epics-wars", he botched up the ending very badly. I appreciated what he did in the end to Sati but he could have made it as a mid-point of the book which honestly is what I expected and what he did in the last two pages should be the second half in more detail which is what you expect if you are re-telling the epic or making it a more believable story of "what-if they are normal mortals?" Add to that the irritating way in which he narrates a scene and I am truly disappointed.
Nothing happens in the book which you can imagine as a retelling/believable version of things all those centuries back which is what he promised about the series in the first book. He ends the book hinting at a retelling of Mahabharatha too but I sincerely hope he doesn't attempt it. I am OK with him re-telling the epics but not by completely deviating from them like he did with this Shiva trilogy.
In conclusion, the book defeats the whole purpose of the series and my respect for Amish is almost completely gone.
Ohh and I forgot to mention that there is no "real" significance to the title of the book in the story.
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