Book Description

The story of ‘The Mountains Within’ is prototypical of the people who grew into first-ever consciousness of their own identities from the obscurity of innumerable socio-cultural microcosms that had existed at the subterranean level for centuries and millennia over the length and breadth of India before the Independence. The story moves from present to past to future with the main protagonist’s grand-daughter setting out to reconstruct the life story of her grand-father she admires. The story is contemporary and relevant to a whole lot of Indians who finished their journeys of existence at the beginning of the new millennium. As they sit back, vacuous and dazed after the ‘retirement’, they cannot help ruminating over the past vis-à-vis their own lives. No matter how objective their self-appraisal, they cannot escape being dubbed a generation of ineffectual crusaders who fell from grace by succumbing to hypocrisies both personal and collective. They cannot exonerate themselves from the stigma of making a mess of a newly liberated country through moral turpitude and lack of individual will. They cannot face up to the younger generation of today and convince them they had no role to play in the fabrication of myths such ‘Mera Bharat Mahaan’. There are no Nuremberg Trials for the crimes we commit within our minds and souls. However, if history is continuity between the past and the present, then ‘The Mountains Within’ does leave some doors open for Nuremberg Trials of the mind and the souls for these Indians.