"Chanakya Chants" has two parallel story running in different ages. One is a historic fiction describing how Chanakya achieved a united 'Bharat' for his protege Chandragupta Maurya. The other parallel story is from modern India, 60 years after independence, and how Gangasar made his protege Chandini the Prime Minister.
In the historical fiction, some of the events are facts which we have read during our school years, and then there are lots of fiction to make the reading interesting.
Where as, reading the current times had a mixed feeling that it was not entirely fictional either. Rather all that has been described has actually occurred over the 60 years since independence.
Just to give you some examples. We had lady prime minister (Indira Gandhi), she was endorsed and placed in power by a famous kingmaker in the Congress party, named K. Kamaraj.
Then there is a mention of how a trader profits from the licence raj implemented in the country. The trick described in the book is similar to what Dhirubhai Ambani was accused of doing.
On the whole the concept of the entire story is that corrupt and vile nature of human beings are not new. The only thing that has changed is the form and how different people try to achieve it. Assassination was a more common way of eliminating enemies during Chanakya's time, and in the new age 'character assasination' is more preferred.
The life of both the protagonist's across the both the eras' show that to attain power takes a lot of sacrifices of various emotions and also of conscience.
It does give an impression that at certain times achieving goals are more important than the means used to attain them. And on other occasions no matter what decisions one takes, it will be deemed as wrong. Like, is it right to allow two kings to go to war and let thousands kill each other or is it correct to use deceit and let the two kings decide through a dual and then kill the surviving king using an assassin!
In short, Aswini Sanghi's second novel should be read by those who have keen interest in either politics or fictional history, it will be worth the time. The novel has a crude language, even the choice of words is not eloquent. It feels very disconnected when on occasions the characters of the novel are using the famous quotes that are attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde and Mao Zedong then on other occasions these characters blurt clumsy lines used in colloquial language.
