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Thank you Anand Neelakantan for making this book, and taking time to answer our questions.
Firstly, an apt analogy to make; as an author representing his case for his client.
I personally believe that Mahabharat is more complex than merely assigning labels of good and evil to one character or the other, there is a grey area in all of them, and its admirable when that aspect is explored in different forms of art/literature/theatre.
I appreciate the fact that Ajaya disputes and challenges rigid preconceptions and established ideas that exist to subjugate the potential for alternative insights by proclaiming an overruling self-sufficiency.
The main character is a reflection of that, of how through history the Mahabharata has been distorted, filtered out, deflected, contorted to fit into certain agendas.
As a character of your piece, Duryodhana/Suyodhana appeals to us emphatically, his ideas resonates with us, it sheds a light into preconceived concepts that enfold our reality and contests the truths that are veiled in a mask of hypocrisy.
The nature and style of your writing from character perspectives enables us to delve into the deeper workings of their minds, and how they see things from their eyes, how they internalise the world. And we get the sense that Suyodhana is trying to calibrate how he fits into society, and other establishments and his need to reject societal norms on the basis of escaping from the fabrications and hypocrisy that contaminate it. It gives us access to the nature of an individual that you couldn't glean from a more objective point of view, through demarcating Suyodhana's story from what we are given to swallow, (in more historical/traditional viewpoints passed down throughout history) where we can instead enter into his mentality and make our own interpretations.
Would you consider writing the story to encompass all the perspectives from the epic, so told from multiple viewpoints?
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