Book Review: Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, Vol. 1 - Kapilavastu

 I have mixed feelings about this book!

I had this book for quite sometime and tried to read this multiple times in the past, but failed to make progress beyond a couple of pages because of the utter ignorance of author on all things related to India and her traditions. The first time I opened the book, I saw "Aryans" and "Invasion" and I promptly underlined the text and wrote - "Dude, there were no Aryans!" and tossed the book aside. Osamu Tezuka might be the finest Manga creator out there, but he displays shocking lack of understanding of the India of Siddhartha's time, the "caste system" and the hierarchy which makes a recurring appearance throughout this volume, how people dressed etc. You could simply replace the (mostly) Indian sounding names with random Roman alternatives, and the setting will probably make more sense. There is slavery, buying and selling of slaves, processions of accused on the roads with crowd booing - kind of like a medieval action drama. There are also characters that randomly call out "O Indra, may your great wrath and mercy be the judge.." as if Indra was Zeus.

Thanks to a long weekend, I wanted something to read on an idle afternoon. I decided to keep these misgivings aside and approach this as just another fiction story without any adhyatmic (spiritual, for the lack of a better word) or "historic" significance - and I must say that I was able to enjoy reading it. I am new to Manga and this was a great introduction to Osamu Tezuka's works. Some of the scenes Osamu depicts are just visual poetry. I never knew that one could convey so much with strokes black ink on a white canvas. I liked the overall book enough to make me search for the rest of Osamu's works!

So to summarize - don't read this book if you want to understand Buddha and his teachings. The author is a confused soul in this department, but if you want playful and sometimes stunning artwork with a good story and humor, go for it! 

The Dilbert Principle - Idiocy

Everyone is an idiot, not just people with low SAT scores. The only difference among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot

I proudly include myself in the idiot category, Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. Its a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

another one..

I blame sex and paper for most of our current problems. Here's my logic: Only one person in a million is smart enough to invent a printing press. So when society consisted of only a few hundred apelike people living in caves, the odds of one of them being a genius were fairly low. But people kept having sex, and with every moron added to the population, the odds of a deviant smart-pants slipping through the genetic net higher and higher. When you've got several million people running around having sex all willy-nilly, the odds are faily good that some pregnant ape-mom is going to squat in a field someday and pinch out a printing-press-making deviant