Sunday, November 20, 2022

Book Review: The Magicians Of Mazda: Ashwin Sanghi

I have been a huge fan of Ashwin Sanghi’s writing and when I read that he is out with a new book – The Magicians of Mazda – I knew I had to get my hands on it. The kind folks at Indica Books sent me a review copy and I couldn’t be thrilled.

Like any other Ashwin Sanghi book, this one is a combination of history, geography, science, and architecture, backed by a lot of research into the smallest of things.

It starts with a Parsi scientist Jim Dastoor getting abducted from his laboratory in Seattle and from there the story traverses Tehran and Afghanistan, while in between also reaching Diu & Kashmir in India. It’s written in a quite a thrilling fashion and the reader is always intrigued to find out what’s going to happen next. Also, his writing style is such that one is always suspecting almost all the characters, thinking one of them is going to frame the other.

There is also a lot of discussion in and around how the Parsis came to be in India, how did they set up their fire temples in different places in West India, primarily Gujarat, and how the protagonist of the story is entrusted with a Parsi secret, as part of his legacy; a secret which some people would even kill to lay their hands on.

While I enjoyed reading the book, and getting to know how similar Parsi and Hindu rituals are, especially with respect to worshipping the fire, at some places, the book becomes quite tedious to keep track of. I kept going back and forth sometimes trying to figure out who the different characters referred to in the book are.