The tl;dr ver­sion? Get a copy and read the book for an interesting–albeit exaggerated–mix of his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary fic­tion with a dash of Machi­avel­lian pol­i­tics and strat­egy–Chanakya­neeti, to be precise.

Chanakya’s Chant

With an attrac­tive golden cover, Chanakya’s Chant is a fairly short read that clocks in at just less than 450 pages.The typog­ra­phy and print qual­ity is good and eas­ily read­able. A rather uncon­ven­tional and inter­est­ing touch is added by a musi­cal ren­di­tion of the chant from which the novel derives it’s name.

Two sto­ries are inter­twined in the novel: Pan­dit Gangasagar’s tran­si­tion from the son of a sim­ple teacher to the power behind every­thing that hap­pens in the coun­try and Chanakya’s achieve­ment of uni­fy­ing Bharat and mak­ing Chan­dragupta the king. Both move at the same pace, over­com­ing chal­lenges with aston­ish­ingly well thought, gen­er­ally twisted and cold-hearted machi­na­tions by the two power-brokers. The nar­ra­tive becomes all the more inter­est­ing because of the par­al­lels in both the prob­lems faced by Chanakya and Gan­gasagar and their solu­tions in spite of the few mil­lenia between the two.

Pan­dit Gangasagar–as the mod­ern day Chanakya–truly steals the show as he applies his art to pol­i­tics. Essen­tially, it is the twisted tricks and plots and plots within plots within  plots that are be rel­e­vant today that make this book the worth­while read it is. See­ing reflec­tions of var­i­ous indus­tries, the extra­or­di­nary polit­i­cal scan­dals and the ADD afflicted media and pub­lic in the book just add to the fun.

The novel starts off fairly promis­ingly from the end of the story with a cliffhanger–though it does seem to lose steam in the begin­ning as the plot is devel­oped and the char­ac­ters are intro­duced; by mid­way both the author’s style of writ­ing finally set­tles down and the pace of the plot picks up to make the novel a page-turner–you really do want to know how both Chanakya and his mod­ern day avatar: Pan­dit Gan­gasagar ful­fill their ulti­mate aim.

Cer­tain themes stand out within the book–the pro­tag­o­nists’ ruth­less­ness in their aims, the sac­ri­fice of love for what they must achieve; the impor­tance of being ahead in under­stand­ing the world as well as tech­no­log­i­cally to suc­ceed; weak­nesses in men that can be exploited. Finally–that all debuts, for good or evil, must be repaid in full.

The style and tone of the book seemed to vary dur­ing my first read–initially the dia­logues and descrip­tions seem bit forced and jerky, one par­tic­u­lar gem that stands out in the pro­logue itself is

“eyes–little video cam­eras that had seen and stored away the very worst of human behav­iour in the giga­bytes of his brain’s hard disk”

How­ever, as the book pro­gresses, it set­tles down well and becomes infi­nitely more read­able with a hint of Rushdie peek­ing out here and there. The author fre­quently uses famous quo­ta­tions attrib­uted to var­i­ous politi­cians through­out the world to make Chanakya/Gangasagar appear all the more wise; some­thing he acknowl­edges at the end of the book with references.

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