Mahabharat

There is one epic in rich Indian history, which is very close to my heart - Mahabharat. It is a story of medieval India ( at least 2000 years before Christ was born), wherein the society reaches a peak in some senses and thus starts to decay and decline. Starting from the famous King Bharat, to all the way to Arjun, Krishna and little beyond it. It spreads over few generations and is a classic display of moral and social values and their conflict with personal interests and power. It is very close to my heart as it is almost "real", that's how human being behave when the situation sets in. Besides its epic narrative of the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional material, such as the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, which has a very high level of philosophical and religious content, or a discussion of the four "goals of life" or purusharthas (12.161). The latter are enumerated as dharma (right action), artha (purpose), kama (pleasure), and moksha (liberation).

There is another Indian epic - Ramayan, which is in a time period before Mahabharat, but it is more depiction of things which are perfect and ideal. If one has to set goals for behavior, social life and responsibilities one must look up to Ramayan and their main characters. They show unparalleled "correctness" when it comes to sticky conflicts. You can find the ideal brother, father, son, wife, follower and leader in Ramayan. However to me it is a touch more idealistic than I can ever imagine myself -- I feel being correct all the time may be a desire and not a consistent outcome.

However, Mahabharat and its characters, they are more "practical", if I may, in their decision making process and conflict resolutions mechanisms. There are so many different levels of the epic, each character can be researched for thousands of pages and we may still not be able to appropriately capture it in all the possible ways. Krishna, Yudhistir, Arjun, Karn, Duryudhan, Shakuni, Draupadi, Gandhari.... the list is endless. When I was growing up, in my mid teens, it used to be a TV series ( B R Chopra's Mahabharat) which spanned over almost 2 years. Every Sunday 9 am on National TV, for one hour we used to leave everything and watch Mahabharat on TV. The whole country used to virtually undergo a curfew, roads were deserted and plans were altered to meet that weekly show time. It got crazy popularity and some of the characters were immortalized by public. I guess, it was truly a milestone in Indian TV history and changed it for ever, much like the real epic itself which is part of India's rich history & culture.

All the management concepts, tricks of the books, organizational behavior, leadership traits and skills which I learned in the books years later, were on live display via the characters of the epic. The amount of learning one can have from it and still continue to have for ever is just enormous. The TV serial actually helped to bring the leanings from the Mahabarat book to common people and real life.

And guess what, after almost 18 years or more, today I found the entire TV series on a 8-DVD set. I was searching it for a while - just wanted to re-live the joy of watching the series and also see if the same story and same characters mean different things after so many years and different personal experiences.

I will try to keep you posted of my thoughts as I watch the entire TV series all over again, just got time to watch couple of initial episodes today.