Eternal Mahabharata

What is found here regarding the aims of human life righteousness, wealth, pleasure, and release may be found elsewhere, O Bull of the Bharatas. But what is not here, is found nowhere.

This blog had covered lessons from Mahabharata many times. It is the only ancient story that focuses mainly on the realities of life on earth (with no GPS and no ticket to heaven). The story unfolds after a mother dog curses a human after he kicks her puppy and that curse lasts for generations and ends generations later when an "almost" nobleman refuses to enter heaven without his dog. 

Gurucharan Das' phenomenal book Difficulty of Being Good is a great place to understand why the lessons from Mahabharata are timeless. 

The story tells us - Humans (including God) are a weird cocktail of good, bad, and myriad other weirdness. Don't fall for magic. Don't dwell in hope. Don't overestimate the goodness of human nature. Instead, always do the right thing. That is the one and the only thing that is in our control.  It is not even close to easy but one has to keep trying. That is the only thing ever worked in this world. So try.

Aeon has a beautiful essay on Mahabharata - Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day

The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterized as a set of narratives about vice.

Inequality and human suffering are facts of life in the Mahabharata. The work offers valuable perspectives and vantage points for reflecting on how various injustices play out in today’s world too.

The Mahabharata claims to show dharma or righteous conduct – a guiding ideal of human life in Hindu thought – within the morass of the characters’ immoral behaviors. But the line between virtue and vice, dharma and adharma, is often muddled. The bad guys sometimes act more ethically than the good guys, who are themselves deeply flawed. In the epic’s polychromatic morality, the constraints of society and politics shackle all.

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Indeed, the Mahabharata’s promise to explore (among other things) immorality, politics, sexism, and identity problems as general features of human life rings true in our times.

Over the past several years, politics in India and the United States have taken dark turns as both countries turn their backs on the values of pluralism and embrace ethno- and religious nationalisms. Violence and death are heavily used tools by governments in both countries.

Sexism has never gone away. It is a critical part of the current surge of Right-wing ideologies and their embrace of male privilege. Moreover, the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are reasserting retrograde gender roles in many places across the globe. The pandemic’s toll on women’s physical safety, mental health and careers is great and growing.

Identity, too, plagues us. The caste system is still very much alive, in both India and the diaspora. We also struggle with types of oppression birthed in modernity, such as racism.

The Mahabharata makes no false promises of solving such problems, but it does offer us tools for thinking them through, now and in the future, even if – or perhaps especially if – that future looks dark. The epic itself foretells:

Some poets told this epic before.

Others are telling it now.

Different narrators will tell it in the future.