“Banker’s retelling succeeds above all others…” – Reader review of Armies of Hanuman
Excerpt from a review of Armies of Hanuman posted (yes, again) on Zed’s blog. Read the full review here
They also serve who only stand and watch
Armies of Hanuman : Book Four of the Ramayana – Ashok K Banker
Rama’s answers drive people to various courses and countenances. They all derive considerably from him though, including Ravana. If one has to lay a finger on the one area where Banker’s retelling succeeds above all others, it has to be this – the manner in which the others derive from Rama, bringing out their own selves in the process and on occasion, Rama’s as well. Throughout the series, there is a constant feeling of Rama being watched or observed until it feels that this burden is bigger than any other – to be subject to constant examination.
“The years of innocence fade away…” – Reader review of Demons of Chitrakut
Excerpt from a review posted on Zed’s blog. Read the full review here
Contemplations aplenty
Demons of Chitrakut : Book Three of the Ramayana – Ashok K Banker
With ‘Demons of Chitrakut’, the Ramayana takes a tragic turn. Having battled external threats in the form of Rakshasas, the protagonists fail to recognize the vermin that their own establishment has bred and nursed. In a way, the years of innocence fade away and the simplistic way of looking at things as us against them comes to an end. It marks the beginning of the phase of growth for the leads Rama, Sita and Lakshmana, as they attempt to deal with forces far beyond their control. Yet the contrast between fighting evil when one is among the blameless and fighting one’s own is set down admirably in two passages. The one involving Kausalya-maa and Bharata reflects upon the far more arduous task of facing negligence, rejection and anger from one’s own than warring with external foes for in tussles of the first kind, one’s only weapons are fortitude of the mind, resolve and endurance. The other instance has Rama wishing he were asked to repeat some of his champion feats from the past few weeks rather than confront the issue of responding to his banishment.
“The passages whirl past and the book becomes a page-turner” – Reader Zed’s review of Siege of Mithila
Excerpt from a review posted on Zed’s blog. Read the full review here
The pace quickens
Siege of Mithila : Book Two of the Ramayana – Ashok K Banker‘Siege of Mithila’ [...] introduces a character as important to the ‘Ramayana’ as Rama Chandra himself – Sita Janaki. Ramayana is as much Rama’s journey as it is Sita’s. This is established early on in the manner of Sita’s introduction. The inter-twining of their destinies has been done in a way that, once again, tells of how much leeway Banker has allowed his imagination. Their meeting – completely circumstantial and with a touch of predestination to it – is a harbinger of what is in store for the couple. The leads have been stripped of their legendary aura and status, rendered afresh as people first. The reputations preceeding them are never allowed to blur their edges. Likewise, Sita is initially presented as a person with deep concerns and strong feelings. The ideals she has come to personify are but a manifestation of what she feels for Rama over a period of time. Their interactions and thoughts about each other are portrayed without any gravitas. It would have been all too easy to fall prey to the temptation of making their mutual love seem intense, eternal even, at the very beginning. This comes to pass eventually but the burden of having to draft their relationship within the bounds of what they have signified to Indians over the years is shrugged off by the author. Here are two young, strong-willed, independent-minded people driven by a sense of purpose who meet, interact and find that they enjoy each other’s companionship. That they are Rama and Sita is secondary.
“I’m simply blown away by the way he has presented the story in his own unique style.” – Reader Vasudha’s review of the Ramayana Series
A review of the Ramayana Series appeared on reader Vasudha Verma’s blog Silent Conversations as part of a larger post devoted to Hinduism’s relevance to contemporary life. The post itself is very intelligent and interesting, and it’s nice to see one’s work stimulating people intellectually.
Excerpt from the review:
I’m presently reading the Ramayana written by Ashok Banker and i’m simply blown away by the way he has presented the story in his own unique style. He has brought the story alive to people of the 21st century who otherwise could never have related to an epic that is so relevant to each one of us, especially today.
SID: An original feature film screenplay
Hi.
In keeping with my policy of keeping in touch directly with readers and avoiding using the media and PR devices, I’m sharing some exciting news with you. Perhaps it’s only exciting to me personally, but I’d like to think it touches you in some small way as well, constant reader.
I’ve just completed an original feature film screenplay called SID.
It’s not an acronym. It’s short for Siddhartha, and if I were to write it in Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali or Prakrit, I would romanize it as ‘Siddh’. But because it’s a person’s name and the person happens to live in the USA in the story, he chose to shorten it to simply ‘Sid’ and I guess I have to respect his choice.
(I’m talking about a fictional character of course, but as all authors who write works that aren’t tailored to meet editorial demands or market formulas know from personal experience, to a writer, a character is as real as any flesh-and-blood person; perhaps even more real than a living being, because a writer can know a fictional character more completely than we can ever know any real-life individual.)
It arose from a series of conversations I had with a film director friend, and subsequently, a film producer, both of whom were very excited by the core idea and encouraged me to develop it as a screenplay. They have even offered to commission me to do so, but I refused to take a rupee or sign any agreement simply because I feel very strongly that doing so is the first and worst compromise any writer can make when creating an original work.
So I wrote it on my own time, without any hope or expectation of earning anything from it, or seeing any fruits of my labour.
It was hard. Tough as hell. But I don’t regret a minute of time invested in this story.
Because, well…
I’m not one to beat about the bush, so let me say this in clear words:
SID is the best thing I have ever written.
Bar none.
It is miles ahead of anything else I’ve created, and all the more precious because it was an unplanned story that I never intended to write, not commissioned by anyone, and a completely unexpected “gift” from my imagination that seemed to pour out of me whole and complete.
It is the best damn work I’ve ever done, pure inspiration backed by some very hard research and demanding technical skills – I had to learn sufficient Arabic to write entire scenes in that language, as well as a smattering of Turki, Prakrit, Pali, among many other things.
While writing it, I actually stopped, looked around and wondered if I would ever write anything half as good in my life again.
I still wonder.
SID is more than words can ever say.
SID is finally my magnum opus, my bid at creating an epic of my own that I sincerely believe stands shoulder to shoulder with the greatest stories of world culture – the greatest epics even.
Now, of course, you want to know what it’s about, right?
How do I describe it?
The tagline I’ve come up with, also very instinctively and naturally, without any conscious thought is this:
SID is one man’s epic journey from war to enlightenment.
That says it pretty well.
The screenplay is a long one, envisioning a film that will run at least 3 hours long.
If adapted to the screen, it will be one of the most ambitious films ever made by anyone anywhere.
It involves scenes from a dozen different time periods, enormously complicated war sequences and several contemporary battles as well as extremely violent conflagarations – all set in contemporary USA and Iraq.
The film’s setting ranges from the USA to Iraq, and ends in India. A major sequence is set on an oceangoing tugboat travelling from Iraq to India.
It has explicit violence, brutal sex, and is realistic in the most shocking and unforgettable ways – it’s a film about our world, our time, and about violence, war, forgiveness, peace, and transcendence.
SID represents the best work I’m capable of at this point in my life and career, aged 45.
What am I going to do with it?
I’m not sure.
I’m showing it to some film professionals – a couple of them in India, but mostly in the west, simply because the scale and scope of the project would be far beyond any Indian film ever imagined, let alone produced.
If SID ever gets made, I have no doubt it would be the biggest, most ambitious, most talked-about film of the year.
It can’t be otherwise.
It’s no less than a spectacular cinematic epic about war, love and enlightenment.
Will it get made?
I really don’t know.
My task was to write it, to pour out this story gifted to me through the power of imagination and shared cultural heritage.
I’ve done that.
What happens next is not entirely upto me.
That’s SID’s fate.
What is up to me is writing a novel version of the same story. Which is something I’m seriously considering right now. Partly because I love the world of SID and because I believe that the novel form will allow me to express certain thoughts, insights, internal monologues that can’t be done through the medium of film.
In the screenplay, I’ve created an audio design, mapped out the musical graph of the background score, indicated the style and form of the cinematography, the kind of performances required, the production style and quality, the screenplay itself is a complete ‘bound script’ as the term goes, with complete dialogues in English, Hindi, Turki, Arabic, etc, and I daresay that any producer or director will find himself or herself able to plan the entire production based on it.
But in a novel, I would be that producer, that director, cinematographer, music composer, arranger, editor…I would be able to do it all, and do it perhaps better than any film ever could. Because while I love the medium of film and have been a huge lifelong fan of the medium – I still watch anywhere from 300 to 500 films a year, and have done so for the past several decades – in the business of cinema, the writer is often regarded as the least important person, the script only a starting point.
Whereas in the medium of published prose, the writer is everything, the ’script’ the whole work.
And I know that SID as a novel would be an even greater story, a fabulous contemporary epic and a powerful parable of our times.
I’ll keep you posted as and when I decided to take the plunge and write SID the novel, but for now, I’m just coming up for air and recharging my batteries and seeing if there are any producers out there who still understand the value of a great screenplay and are even interested in reading one, if not producing a film of this scale.
I’m neither hopeful nor do I lack hope. I’m simply going to check things out and see what happens.
In the end, I know this much: SID was a gift to me, perhaps the greatest story I’ve ever written, certainly one of the greatest I’ll ever write. Whether it becomes a feature film, or a novel, or both, just the thrill of having been inspired to create something this powerful, this unforgettable is reward enough for me.
Anything more – the screenplay bought and made into film, the novel written and perhaps even published – is really just incidental.
The play’s the thing.
‘UNPUTDOWNABLE’: Reader Zed’s review of Prince of Ayodhya
Excerpts from a review posted on Zed’s blog. Read the full review here
Rendezvous with Rama
Prince of Ayodhya : Book One of the Ramayana – Ashok K Banker
Prince of Ayodhya, the first of six books in Ashok K Banker’s retelling of the Ramayana, begins with a well-written preface. A literary endeavour such as this needs an outline of the author’s intentions and possibly, a hint at what his/her interpretation might hold for the reader. The former is revealed with precision and clarity in the author’s declaration that this isn’t his tale or that of any of his illustrious predecessors (Valmiki, Kamban, Tulsidas and Rajagopalachari to name a few). It is intended to be Rama’s tale. As to the latter, there is one particularly portentous portion of the prelude that reveals the author’s sense of gratitude to the adi-kavya for giving him the means of escape during childhood. In this fashion, the prelude sets the tone for the narrative. After the first reading, I am breathless to know what shall ensue in the next book (Siege of Mithila), sated by the author’s take on some of the issues that have never been done full justice to in any of the recent abridged versions of the Ramayana, bemused at the snippets of information, and to a lesser extent, a touch annoyed at some aspects of the book.……………….
The other factor in its favour is the narrative bestowing upon the book the tag of ‘unputdownable’. As the blurbs note, it never flags and makes the reader eager to know what unfolds next even if one knows the flow of the story pretty well. The unquestioned highlight of the first book though is the relationship between Kausalya and Dasaratha. A reader familiar with the Ramayana can see that this dynamic has a bearing upon nearly everything that follows. The one grouse here is that, in his drive to portray Dasaratha’s first Queen as a woman of perfect qualities, Banker presents a Kaikeyi with no redeeming features whatsoever (things can change in subsequent books though). She is not the haughty warrior princess turned Queen mother misled by a scheming Manthara we know of.
………………..
Ayodhya itself is well conceived, not in its detail but in its veracity. A mighty bastion of the Aryan peoples and the pride of the Ishvaku race, the revelation of internal corruption gnawing at the roots of Ayodhyan existence is an embellishment that serves the narrative well. For the most part, Banker’s topologies act as fitting scenes for the drama to play out. This is particularly evident in the journey of the princes accompanied by Brahmarishi Vishwamitra from Ayodhya to Bhayanak-van.
Overall, the first installment is a delightful read, worth savouring for the fresh insights alone, if for nothing else.
VORTAL: Shockwave cover designs – check them out!
The final cover designs for VORTAL: Shockwave are in. And my cover designer Chandan Crasta has done a terrific job, IMO.
But don’t take my word for it.
Check out the designs yourself.
These are basically thumbnails in low-res, to faciliate quicker loading, so you can’t expect to get the full beauty of the design.
But I think you’ll get the general idea.
And feel free to leave your feedback on Readerswrite as usual.
It’s a double front cover, by the way.
There’s a front cover, fully black with a hole punched through the ‘O’ of VORTAL. Through the hole you can see the inside cover.
Then there’s the inside cover, which is the door.
And finally, the back cover, of which there’s only one.
THIS IS THE FRONT COVER
THIS IS THE INSIDE FRONT COVER
AND THIS IS THE BACK COVER
Sold out on pre-order! 
Available only from me directly. 
Available only from me directly. 
Available only from me directly. 