A very good novel based on a positive subject matter of Indian culture, is out now. The auther is a community worker in USA. Her name is Lata Pimplaskar. Last year she joined as a volunteer for local Hindu Temple Sunday School(100+ registered children under age of 12). Her curriculam has made a dramatic impact on the BalVihar children.
The subject matter of her Novel is completely opposite to recent English Novels that dwell mainly on a insignificant negative side of Indian Culture, to wrongfully project this negative aspect as the main part of Indian culture. These negative subject matters attract Booker Prizes or a seed money from SAJA.(Novel VISHNU, with a low esteemed and drunkard character Vishnu was funded by SAJA, an Association of ABCD NRI Jurnos. Remember?? Deepa Mehta made a film with Lesbians characters named Sita and Radha.?)
This Novel Titled "Light of Lights" is different. It does not try to offend Hindu sentiments.
Therefore, this novel is least likely to get attention from International Awards that normally prefer the negative side of Indian cultural as the theme.
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Below is a review of "Light of Lights" by a reader:
The Light with which we see, not the lights we see.,
March 21, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from St. Augustine, FL USA
Reviewed by a Professor of Philosophy
Ms. Pimplaskar has achieved in a rather short novel what so many of us struggle to put together in innumerable articles and books. India in her Hindu garb is One, indivisible, the origin and matrix of the many paths of return to the unity, the womb of creation.
In a limpid, transparent prose, from the first line of the book to the last, the reader cannot help but feel at home. India becomes alive in this magnificent novel and so do the characters. Do not be surprised if the conflicts of the characters accompany you to work, play or sleep. Your own integrity is at risk while reading this book.
Are you close to Tony, the Catholic? Missionary? with no other roots in the Catholic community than the distance of his own trauma that brought him to India? Or is it Maya, the beautiful Hindu girl, raised to love, but divided constantly by those, like Tony, who put their ideology ahead of their heart? Why is she abandoned by her own family the moment she consummates her love with Tony? Or are you more like Mr. Pandit, a brahmin barrister, but also a walking, embittered shadow of the Colonial British Empire ? Or perhaps Chritra, Mr. Pandit's daughter, also a lawyer, trying to pay for the sins of her father by helping the poor and the dispossessed? Father and daughter are separated by the colonial mimesis that brought them together, but in the end reunited by love in suffering. The fabric of the Indian landscape is turned from the prose of the book to the mental webs of the mind of the reader without any effort. The cycle of festivals props up as a background to the cycle of human life, the solid identity of the lower casts, the sectarian strife, the wheel of conversions from one religion to another, and back to the original one to return to the new one. Where the prose stops and our lives take over is up to the reader to decide, but it does happen when reading this book.
Maya, the lead character of the novel, steals your heart away. Why wouldn't Tony fall in love with her? Yes, he does, but in doing so the reader also discovers that he comes empty from inside to the ritual of love and also empty handed. He can only take not give. Maya must conform to his lines of demarcation. She must convert, she must only serve his god with the exclusion of all others, she must... she must...And what about Tony, what does he have to give up? Not much, if anything. He is a Catholic that becomes a missionary by contract. He is no priest, no theologian, not much of a religious person. He is a medical technician running away from America and his sister's suicide, to hide in India and lick his wounds. But he falls in love and he is unprepared for its power of transformation.
Who will guide the conclusion of this novel, of Tony and Maya, Christ or Krishna, the Savior or the Avatara? Is there room in Tony for human growth? Will Maya surrender her integrity as a Hindu to the unity and indivisibility of life, to the One, by trimming her inner life to the size of a superimposition, as required by Tony, on the One? Tony, Maya or the reader do not seem to know the answer. But one suspects the author does. It is in the title itself of the novel" Light of Lights." For the reader to know beyond the end he/she must read this book not looking for the lights we see when reading it but looking instead for the light with which we see, lumen de lumine, the light of light. Highly recommended, 4,1/2 stars.
I am a Prof. of Philosophy, Emeritus, SUNY And a Director of the Bio-cultural Research Institute, Florida
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Available at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931456585/002-0449700-7405648
Light of Lights
by Lata Pimplaskar ; Paperback
Average Customer Rating: 5 Stars
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