In literature, many instances of brothers & sisters instead of correcting, aiding each other in iniquity are observed, probably owing to their shared DNA.
In Virata Parva of Mahabharatha, Queen Sudeshna, wife of King Virata, instead of advising her brother Kichaka against his philandering, aids him & even puts pressure on Draupadi (who was serving her in disguise as Sairandhri) to accede to his wishes, resulting in the death of Kichaka.
In Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", the adulterous behaviour of the title character, which led to her tragic death, was mirrored in the behaviour of her brother Prince Oblonsky, who himself was not a faithful husband, causing immeasurable problems to his family.
In Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park", the siblings Henry & Mary Crawford, try to fool around the affections of the "made for each other" couple of Edmund Bertram & Fanny Price. Henry, true to his nature, elopes with a married woman. When Mary, defends him to Edmund, saying if Fanny had married him, he would not have done it, Edmund's eyes are fully opened to Mary's insidious behaviour, leading to his discarding her, & uniting with his true love Fanny.
The Nobel Prize for Literature was instituted in 1901. To date, it has been awarded to 116 persons. Notable winners (in chronological order) are, Kipling, Maeterlinck, Tagore, Rolland, Hamsun, (Anatole) France, Yeats, Shaw, Bergson, Mann, (Sinclair) Lewis, Galsworthy, Pirandello, O'Neill, (Pearl) Buck, Hesse, Gide, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Russel, Mauriac, Churchill, Hemingway, Camus, Pasternak, Steinbeck, Sartre, Sholokhov, Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, Bellow, Singer, Marquez, Golding, Morrison, Heaney, Grass, Naipaul, Coetzee, Pinter, Pamuk & Dylan.
These 43 writers comprise only 37% of the total 116, the remaining 63% returning to oblivion. Pasternak was forced by his country to reject the Prize, but his "Dr. Zhivago" was made into an epic movie. Sartre himself rejected the Prize. Theroux, Naipaul's protégé turned foe, writes amusingly how when every year the Literature Nobel was announced, Sir Vidia would throw a tantrum until finally in 2001 he got one!
The greatest furore was created when in the first year, 1901, Tolstoy was not given. So for the next 5 years, 1902-6, he was nominated, but never awarded! This, for (arguably) the greatest writer of all time, writing the greatest novel of all time, "War & Peace"!
How wrong can human judgement go?
In literature, many instances of brothers & sisters instead of correcting, aiding each other in iniquity are observed, probably owing to their shared DNA.
