Yayati - A tale by two authors

After a long time I started reading and what better way to start than with my favourite author, R K Narayan. I read Ramayana and Gods,Demons and Others. Both are about the mythological stories we used to see on TV and used to hear read through books.Even though I knew most of the stories in the book in one form or another, there was ample enthusiasm in me to go through each and every story as if I was reading it for the very first time. One quality of a reader, according to me, which is very essential while reading a book is to shed preconceived notions about the book or the subject. Only then he can enjoy it thoroughly.
Coming back to the books, I enjoyed them thoroughly. But one story that caught my attention was Yayati. I had read a Kannada drama Yayati written by Girish Karnad. So I was eager to see howR K Narayan would recite the story. But I was taken by surprise how author's can represent characters.This made me put my thinking cap on. Girish Karnad was trying to capture the anguish of Puru and the greed of Yayati in his drama while R K Narayan was trying to just put across the story of Yayati to the common reader without putting too much of a debate in the reader's mind. It did not seem that the author was as excited about the characters of Puru and Yayati as much as Karnad was. While R K Narayan does not dwell into making the reader judge the character of the protagonist Karnad makes people go into a judgmental mode as when the characters are etched deep into the reader's mind. And what an impact it was.

After all this comparison I must say, I am not worthy of being a critic to these two outstanding literary works. I was trying to project my state of mind when I was reading the story of Yayati as written by R K Narayan in Gods, Demons and Others.