THE PREGNANT KING by Devdutt Pattnaik

This book of makes me a fan of Devdutt Patnaik, the author. This is the first work by him that I read and it wont be the last one... What touched me in this book is the ambiguity of life that he brings out in each of its characters, the tensions between ethics, social expectations and personal experiences. The realm of grey is very interestingly broughtout, something that we live everyday but fail to acknowledge, always lost in trying to put in Black and white, the acceptable and non-acceptable, trying to justify our experiences within the mainstream experiences. I loved the turns that you take: the two brahmin boys who come as couple and get caught, the rucus over them being arrested as two boys but tried as a couple after one's transformation in the night, the confusions, the king so confident of himself who has to face the contridiction within himself, his tension of being a mother and a father at the same time...and rejection by his son when he gives away the secret. Its exactly the same when homophobic father realises that his own son is gay...something so confident of having borne a child like himself only to face a reality that he has given birth to someone whom he always rejected in his belief system. Time plays tricks that forces us to question our "rational" selves everytime and this work captures this human truth within frames of mythology. Just loved it till the last.