Reviews page 2
Memoirs
- Memoirs
- History
- Spirituality
Title: The Dance of Destiny
Author: Raja (Arasa) Ratnam
Rating:  Very Good!
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Web Page:
www.trafford.com
Publisher's E-mail: 1
Reviewed by:
M.K.Turner
|
 
| |
Raja Ratnan's "The Dance of Destiny" can be read in a number of
different ways. The most approachable for a Westerner is as memoir and
history. Although the author has lived for over fifty years in
Australia, his childhood and youth were spent in Malaya where his
Ceylonese (Sri Lanka today) family had settled several generations
before. His was an ethno-culturally diverse world, shared by the native
Malay with immigrant waves of Chinese, Indian, and Timor Ceylonese
while under British rule. With the Japanese occupation in the early
1940s, however, the boy's orderly life with its straightforward
trajectory toward an eventual professional career and place of honor in
his family became a disjointed period of stops and starts. When his
father died shortly after the war and his mother became obsessed with
poorly chosen ambitions for her son, he found himself studying for a
career in medicine in Australia, totally unprepared and falling into the
abyss of family failure. Ratnan's personal story with its subsequent
successes and failures carries the narrative of the book.
Australia (very like the
USA) is a land of immigrants and "The Dance of Destiny" is as much a
coming-of-age story for Australia as it is Ratnan's. We follow the
nation from political and cultural adolescence after WWII as reflected
in its unconscious assumption that White is, quite naturally, the
superior skin color and Christianity, quite supernaturally, the only way
to God. Ratnan's social and professional experiences are one long
litany of injustices, but by the end of his career in government he
records major advances in immigration and ethnic policies and develops a
true affection for his chosen country. "Thus" he writes, "in terms of
humanity, and a very necessary ethnic diversity, I saw the beginnings of
a new Australia."
So this is a very
interesting and thought provoking book and made even more so where the
narrative is interspersed with the author's metaphysical meditations.
Ratnan has read deeply and written at length about religion and
spirituality. Such contemplation has made him more able to accept what
he calls his wheel-falling-off experiences as mere "manifestations of
human will-power and folly, in a universe whose external and internal
trajectories are symbolically signified by the flight of dragons."
Ratnan is in his eighties now. Believing as he does in reincarnation
and the role of Destiny in his life, there is no closure to his story.
One thinks, rightly so.
Go Back read another review, or choose a different category.
|
|
