To account for happenings of the natural world around, people crafted tales. Oftentimes subjective, in the sense that the same happenings were talked about, through stories with varied skeletal frameworks, in different cultures around the globe, these auditory tales acquired diverse facets, predominantly factored by perceptibility.

Albeit her intended audience are children, the timeless classics she has in such a systematically catalogued manner collated together that it makes for her work to amount to a credulous but philosophical mind, with a fancy for the tales of the days gone by.

What is most underrated about her book, perhaps, is the way the contents have been tabulated. It is no mere task to bring together mythologies from lands so diverse as Persia, Africa, China, the Maori, Greece and India, and yet not divert oneself from the three great periods the timeline of the planet has, in these tales, been fractionated - the creation, the age of conflict and the churning. As much as creation, for instance, is about Nu Wa and Pangu shaping the world, it is also about the zebra getting its stripes and the genesis of mythologies and tales about the angels who reside beyond the portals of paradise and peek at humans through the starry sky of the night, whence Nyx reigns.

Rajendran’s work is also quite unconventional insofar as stories from tribes so remote as the San of Africa and the Maori from Australia have found their place, dismissing quite evidently the disproportionate recognition they’re granted by mainstream academia. It is not just the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians and the Germanics who told tales so unco in the way they’re crafted - it’s very much also about the Africans, the Native Americans, the Arabians and the Sri Lankans, for that matter, and they too, deserve to be heard.

Even though it looks quite similar, in the manner it has drawn mythologies centred around similar tellings from various cultures, regions and tribes to create an eclectic mix, to Pilling’s ‘Realms of Gold: Myths & Legends from Around the World’, the two authors have their own distinctive periods of human history - while Rajendran goes with the phases the myths deal with, Pilling considers it more appropriate to classify mythical ages in accordance with the predominant literary elements of the age - “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,'' “Love and Death'” and “Fools and Heroes”.

Rajendran’s work is for the inquisitive mind. If you’ve ever felt the urge of asking yourself questions like, “Why is the boat tour at the Niagara Falls called ‘Maid of the Mist’?”, ‘Myths and Legends from around the World’ is your perfect companion for the day. Vivid and simplistic as the tone of the narration is, the informative content it boasts of, makes the work all the more recommended, for it is in the effulgence of the curious human mind that a myth’s true worth, in bridging ages, is realised.