The Ramayana is certainly one of the world's oldest legends. Modern scholars claim that it was first composed around 300 BC. The devout Hindu believes that Rama lived many hundred millennia ago, in the treta yuga, and that was also when Valmiki first told his immortal story. The epic is called the Adi Kavya, the world's first poem. The God Brahma himself is meant to have inspired Valmiki to create his classic, in twenty-four thousand slokas.The sages of India have always said that the true purpose of the Ramayana is to awaken its reader spiritually, and to send him forth on the great journey that leads to Moksha, to God.Though he takes no liberties with the story, Ramesh Menon's Ramayana is a novelist's lush, imaginative rendering of the epic, rather than a scholar's translation . Yet, even if the language he uses is modern and exciting, his book remains, first and last, a work of worship, of bhakti. As he wrote and rewrote it for ten years, this was his offering to Rama.