Book Review: Ramayana: Divine Loophole

Sanjay Patel's take on the classic Sanskrit epic is refreshing and engaging. Adapted and written in a lighter prose, the book is inviting to any readers who want learn more about the tale. The story is fascinating and gets increasingly so towards the end, with lots of nice surprises. For someone like me who knows nothing about any Hindu stories, I felt like I know a lot more after reading this book.

The story is well paced and laden with beautiful illustrations. Each page is filled with scenes of glorious colours — nothing less for this colourful tale. The characters are also nicely designed. The vector style drawings (known for straight lines and smooth curves) are unique, especially when used to tell mythical tales, and work very well in this case.

Sanjay Patel also talked a bit about the making of this book. It took four years in the making, or 7 days per page. Vector drawings are very time consuming because it involves plotting and joining points using a graphic software to form (countless) lines. Basically you have to draw the draft and redraw everything again in vector with the scanned draft. Hats off to him for this tremendous piece of effort.

Also included at the back are some sketches of the preliminary ideas. Pretty fun to look at. The cartoon style interpretation of some scenes will give you an idea what the book could have turned out to be if not done in vector style.

This is a fun and nice read. I don't know if this book is intended for kids but it's certainly a book anyone can like.

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