Book: Faith: 40 insights into Hinduism
Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Harper Collins India
If you have always had questions about Hinduism and were not quite satisfied with the replies you got, Devdutt Pattanaik’s book, Faith: 40 insights into Hinduism tries to answer some of them for you, without making you run for cover.
Speaking of covers, the book has one with a colour mellower than the golden yellow of turmeric, like the fragrant ashtagandha ‘teeka’ used in worship, weddings and on other auspicious occasions. Moving on to what’s between the covers, there are 40 short chapters, with fascinating titles like, ‘Can I be a Hindu and still an atheist?’ ‘Is Hinduism’s Narasimha like Hollywood’s Wolverine?’ ‘Do Hindus lose their caste when they travel abroad?’ ‘What do the Manusmriti and the dharma-shastras have to say about homosexuality?’ And most importantly, ‘Is the samosa Indian, or Vedic?’
Pattanaik promises to answer these and other questions ‘with love and dignity’ and for the most part, he does. The voice one hears is calm, collected and gently explains, a far cry from the strident tones one hears in the outside world currently.
At the outset, we are told, it is not entirely accurate to use the terms Vedic and Hindu interchangeably because “technically speaking, the Vedic period is pre-Buddhist and over 3000 years old while Hinduism as we know it today took concrete shape around 2000 years ago...”
Thus, the process of elucidation goes on. But the seeker of answers to questions like why do many Hindus value sons over daughters? Why do bad things happen to innocents? will continue to seek. More insight into karma from past births would have been appreciated.
As for the samosa question, the answer, one could say, is all around us but it would certainly be worth one's while to pick up the book and read from back to front, if one urgently needs to know. There were a few typographical errors in the book. Perhaps these will be rectified in future editions, one hopes.
