THE Understated CHAOS

Lessons from an ancient epic that echoes truth   of  the  Present Times In 2014,   the Indian television show the Mahabharat aired. The show, which began airing in 2013, was a version of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, and was widely successful, garnering millions of viewers daily. Its success followed that of another televised version of the epic that ran from 1988 to 1989. The Sanskrit epic itself is the world’s longest epic poem, as I have said a lot of times but have I told you that the longest epic is equal to about 100,000 couplets or 1.8 million words. It is ten times the combined length of the Iliad and Odyssey and three times the length of the Bible. Structurally, the Mahabharata is a compendium of ancient Indian mythology, history, political theory, and philosophy, and has sometimes been described as an ancient encyclopedia of Indian knowledge. The holy Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita , which is considered a summary of th...

Socio-ethical Mahabharata relevance in modern society Growing up in the 1930s and surviving to remember the Holocaust all one's life must have been a  pure agony. “The horror of that time and place was not an abstraction for me: a cousin with whom I used to play as a child had come out of Auschwitz with her identity number tattooed on her arm and a burden of dreams from which she would wake up screaming, night after night,” writes Maggi Lidchi-Grassi, who was in Paris during the post-war years. Fig- 2.1 War of Kurukshetra depicting Bhisma and Nazi Germans   She chanced upon a French translation of Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita . She realised that a rationalistic answer to what had happened in the global war was neither possible nor desirable. Caught in a moral dilemma , Arjuna found release “in something from another dimension, a vision in which the terrifying ambiguities of morality are somehow resolved.” Thus was born the author's anabasis carrying ...

                                                    Moral Dilemmas in Mahabhatarat One of the main concerns of Mahabharata is dharma. It is discussed throughout the text by various characters in various situations and thus all the prevalent ideas of the time are put forward and examined. An ethical dilemma arises when a person is committed to two or more moral obligations and he cannot fulfil one without violating his duty to the other. It presents irreconcilable alternatives and the choice between them seems to be made irrationally or for reasons other than moral. The classic and the most well known example is Arjuna’s dilemma at the beginning of the war which necessitates the Bhagvadgita. There are other instances. For example in the Karnaparva, Yudhishthir is forced to flee the battlefield after being painfully humiliated an...

1. The Framework of Time, Place and Perceptions Now, Before we begin analysing the text it is essential to understand that the values discussed in Mahabharata are always relative to time and place.   Also, for many Indians the Mahabharata is not an imaginary tale, it represents real events that took place around 1000 B.C. Thus it is important that the events in the Mahabharata must be judged in the context of their time and place. The social values of those days supported the social order. The social order then was male-dominated, polygamous and class oriented. It is in this social framework that our work is situated. 2. Ethics and Dharma Before we can talk of ethics, it is necessary to keep in mind that the word used in Mahabharata is dharma and while the two are interrelated, the latter is wider in scope and more  complex. Both deal with issues of what we ought to do but ethics seems more concerned with  the moral conduct necessary for the survival and ...