The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das

I saw this book on sale while in India, should have bought it. I don't know what I was thinking...
Now via MR, I got to know it's yet to be out on Amazon here.

"The Mahabharata still speaks to rural peasants and is still being transmitted by wandering, illiterate bards in remote Indian villages. Yet its deeply sophisticated philosophical interludes also represent some of the most profound thinking on morals, ethics and duty ever written, and are among the deepest expressions of Hindu thought. Indeed it is the contention of Gurcharan Das, the celebrated Indian writer on economics and enthusiastic amateur Sanskritist, that its teachings represent just as valuable a guide on how to live a moral and ethical life in the world today as it did in the early centuries BC when it was first written, tackling the eternal questions of Everyman: “Who am I?” “What should I do?” “What is right?”

After taking early retirement from a career as the chief executive of Proctor & Gamble India, Gurcharan Das went to Chicago to study Sanskrit under the two great American scholars of the “language of the gods”, Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger, and The Difficulty of Being Good represents an attempt by Das to bring together the two sides of his life, the literary and the practical. The result is a highly personal and idiosyncratic, yet richly insightful meditation on the application of ancient philosophy to issues of modern moral conduct and right and wrong. Das is especially focused on his native India, which today is mired in corruption, with one out of every five members of parliament having had criminal charges levelled against him: “Moral failure pervades our public life and hangs over it like Delhi’s smog.”

At the centre of the book is Das’s quest to understand the elusive term dharma, a word which means at once duty and religion, justice and righteousness, law and goodness. Dharma lies at the heart of the ethical questions explored in The Mahabharata, and as Das puts it: “The conceptual difficulty is part of the point. Indeed The Mahabharata is in many ways an extended attempt to clarify whatdharma is – that is, what exactly should we do, when we are trying to be good in the world.”

Both the strength and weakness of The Difficulty of Being Good lies in the sheer complexity of looking for clear moral teachings in the profoundly ambiguous teachings of an epic that is “about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this world”. It is true that the Pandavas’ gentle leader, King Yudhishthira, is admired for his unbreakable commitment to satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence) and anrishamsya (compassion)."