The latest and 5th fiction novel written by Ashwin Sanghi aka Shawn Haigins, ’The Sialkot Saga’ is an epic book written by him. It took me 40 days and 582 pages. Well it’s the fattest book written by him and can be called as a business thriller which is full of Indian political and social happenings from 1950 and onwards, with all the real names included.
It’s a story of 2 businessman Arvind Bagadia, a marwari based out of Kolkata and Arbaaz Sheikh, a small-time-thief-turned-don-turned-businessman-turned-politician based out of Mumbai. Both are against each other and are no 1 in occupying wealth by all means. But they are bounded in an unknown relationship which dated back to the time of emperor Ashoka. And then there is a usual twist of Dan Brown’s legacy of mixing a might-be-true fact and fiction.
This novel is again having 2 different timeliness just like Chanakya’s Chant, 1 of india’s timeliness starting from 1947 and goes up to 2010 and the other timeliness dated back to 250 BCE till 1833 and that’s how at the end the timeliness matched with each other, I could say that it’s a brave attempt to do what is done in the end pages. The Indian timeline contain so many true historical events and consists of so many real historical characters, and it seems author is very much fond of the great bjp politician Atal Bihari Vajpayee that he came up in cameos at many places in the book. So if you’re into history of india, you can get a feel of here if you haven’t read it anywhere else since here our two main characters and their lives intermingled between these history lessons, so I felt after reading that somehow the author missed the basic plot that it’s the characters about whom this book is written for, it looks to me the other way round that characters are just put in between of history lessons. Characters missed depth and importance. In the end finally author tries to put some ancient secrets and finishes off the book in hurried manner. Had he used some of it during the course of story it would be better.
I will say yes for Ashwin’s fan but if you’re not, you can give it a miss. He included everything in this novel(just like movie mausam) and too many things spoil the plot, he could have been written a shorter version. Plus in the end everything falls easily into it’s place. Good to know that there are some secrets at the end which we want to believe. Author has done some mistakes in between, some typo errors as well. His characters seems far more intelligent than they should have been in real. This book was certainly better than his PRIVATE INDIA but not better than his remaining 3 novels.
GRuchirG.
Jai Raam ji ki:)