It is so difficult to achieve a combination of the ancient and the modern, the historical and the imaginary, the authentic and the innovative. But in The Last Kaurava by Kamesh Ramakrishna we have it. In it, the Mahabharata comes alive with a twentyfirst century zest.
The author who grew up in Bombay and studied at IIT-Kanpur, holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He has made significant contributions to software engineering and architecture and lives at present in Massachusetts. But, as he states in the Introduction of this novel, his interest in the Mahabharata is long standing. ‘As a child, the Mahabharata fascinated me—not only did it have heroes, heroines, villains, and fastpaced action, but it also raised profound human questions about fairness, the need for revenge, the horror of war. When I became interested in history and pre-history, I struggled to fit the stories into what the archaeological record showed on the ground’ (p. 9).
December 2015, volume 39, No 12