By Christopher Tobutt

Books & Books at Camana Bay, with its aim of promoting interest in literature and upholding a sense of belongingness for all lovers of the written word, held a very interesting discussion on The Book of Walla, a novel written by local author M Ram Krishn (better known as Murali Ram) on Thursday, 10 September.

The book is about the concept of God, about religion, and about the limitations of a too dogmatic approach to religion. It is based around the original idea of a man taking God to court, following a series of personal tragedies which he attributes to religion zealots, and therefore, by extension to God.

As an author Mr Krishn is something of a conundrum. During the discussion, when asked if he believed in God, he didn’t answer directly, but did say he, ‘believed in a higher power,’ but also that ‘we have the ability to ‘design ourselves’.

Paradoxically for someone who doesn’t appear to believe in God in the traditional sense, Mr Krishn stated his primary objective in writing the book was to: “Introduce the different faiths, and what they mean,” and his intended audience were “people who are religious but who may not know about other religions.”

This desire to illuminate the religiously-minded with a greater understanding of other faiths, coming from a man who apparently doesn’t have any religious faith at all, should be a good indicator of the Book of Walla’s unusual philosophical position.

More intriguing still is Mr Krishn’s explanation of how he was inspired to write the book, which he appeared to put down to divine providence. After a kind of prayer about what to write about (aimed at a possibly-existing God) the idea came to him, he said, after having a rather lengthy and inebriated conversation about ‘the God concept,’ with a European tourist.

The tourist seemed to know little about religions other than the nominal form of Christianity he had been brought up with, but after a conversation lasting more than two hours, Mr Krishn was furnished with the idea for the novel.

Mr Krishn was born into a Hindu family, but later grew up to reject his family’s religion while voraciously researching other religions in the library of the university he attended.

The book was intended to be a ‘short book,’ rather than a long one, according to the author, and his legal training (Mr Krishn is a lawyer by profession) gave him the idea of a trial for the setting of the book.

Mr Krishn asked the guests to guess where the geographical setting for the book actually was. Some said they thought it was set in Malaysia; others no particular place, as the characters in the book seemed to constitute somewhere so cosmopolitan that it couldn’t be real.

The book was actually set in East London, Mr Krishn said, a fact he had deliberately kept hidden, partly because he felt that readers wouldn’t believe it.

There were clearly many different points of view represented in the discussion as we might expect from such a book, although Mr Krishn acknowledged the likely outcome would be that his intended audience- those who already had definite ideas about their faith- would probably not be the first people reading it.