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...

At the order of President Donald Trump, the U.S. military lobbed dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian air base from which a chemical weapons attack was launched this week that killed Syrian civilians — to include children. Trump’s critics are already denouncing the strikes as a sign of his recklessness and America’s deepening and unwise involvement in the Syrian civil war. His supporters are celebrating the attack as a sign of the sort of American resolve that has been missing for the last eight years as well as a message to the world’s bad guys. So which is it? Should we condemn or praise Trump’s decision? The answer, of course, is not so easy. I offer my thoughts below. It is late, I am tired, and I have more questions than answers, but here it goes. The Good When the Obama administration was leaning towards a military response to the 2013 Syrian chemical attack to enforce its declared red line — even though I did not favor an attack without broad-based popular, Congre...