What!! is this guy crazy? Hasn’t he got anything else to blog about? This is cheating- you can’t blog about childhood stories in your literary reviews. And so on and so forth

Believe me friends, I did read Mahabharata- not the entire translation but an edited one by C.Rajagopalachari (yes. The last governor-general of India ), so writing about it here does not constitute ‘cheating’. Reading it gave me many delightful discoveries which I thought I might share with you guys- guys like me who have watched only serials and think they know mahabharata.

So lets’s start. For instance how many of us know that vidura was dharma(i.e Yamaraja in other words) incarnate, cursed to be a mortal because he’d meted out to a rishi punishment which was grossly disproportionate to his sins. Also I might add Mahabharata shows how our so called heroes “the pandavas” were no different than kauravas in warfare. The book changed my view of the kauravas completely. For instance Arjun sneaked up an attack on Bhurisrava when he was going to kill his good friend Satyaki, even though Satyaki was fighting a one-on-one battle with Bhurisrava and was losing. Even Yudhishthira is not without reproach- he gambled away his wife(what a dunce), let her be humiliated in public, lied to Drona, sacrificed Abhimanyu when he thought that he himself will be captured in battle. To speak of Bhima-phew! was he uncivilized- drinking blood from duhshasana’s chest, insulting hanuman(funny thing is hanuman gave him a boon for that), tearing limbs,etc. Of all the righteousness that he preached Krishna was not spot free either- he chaeted in many cases; like instructing Bhima how to kill jarasandha, telling him how to kill Duryodhana(you know his actual name is Suyodhana), telling Arjuna to kill Karna even though he was unarmed, etc- in short most of the cheatings in mahabharata were instigated by him in some form or the other.

All in all Mahabharata exposes the fact that man can never be honest, truthful, humble, calm, composed, etc (i.e he can never be ‘good’). So I should conclude- if they can do it then so can we [ :) ] and after all, I have taken a dip in the ganges so my place in heavens is assured isn’t it?