Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Why do we Love Mahabharata?

I was listening a podcast in which narrator is narrating the great Indian epic Mahabharata. I was listening to the episode where war has broken out between the two armies. The objectives of these two armies have a clear demarcation i.e. One army, i.e. Pandavas, is fighting for truth and righteousness whereas another army, i.e Kauravas, is covered under the cloud of lies and Adharma.

As per the narrator the reason to love this epic is knowing the results at the start only. He tells that the person on the side of Dharma is going to crush others with the help of god, and this reason is good enough to love the epic, which has such an elaborate description of the war between Satya and Asatya. If we  adhere to the reason of narrator, we all must love every Bollywood movie which starts with two guys who are on the different sides of Karma.

Though I love this podcast and love his way of delivering the artifacts about this enormous piece of scripture, yet I differ from his reason. I love this epic for various satisfactory reasons. Few such reasons are mentioned below.

1. This epic demonstrates the human life. A man fight for the Land, and the honour of ladies. Man has to retain the honour which is compromised by ladies during some worthless debates. As man's life revolves around a female protagonist, similarly Mahabharata has revolved around different ladies. All these ladies shared their part of glory in the epic.
Shantunu falling in love with a lady and leaving the complete nation in chaos to have her.
Bhism abducting princess for his impotent brothers.
Dropadi commenting on her brother in laws and giving them a reason to write such a history.

2. Even though this epic is similar to human life, but still it does not lose supernatural substance to maintain our interest in the story. These supernatural characters intervened at times to spice the story up. Few demonstrations of such super powers are as mentioned below.
Krishna killed all Ashuras in his childhood.
Krishna showed entire universe in his mouth.
Lot of Rishies and Munies chanted blessings and curses at the start to impact the final consequence of the story in the end.
Most funny yet the most interesting story is about the length of the Dropdi's sari.

3. This epic has elaborate description of the war. Writer has concentrated on each and every character of the story. Writer has made sure that anyone supporting Adharma does not go unpunished.

4. Bhagwat Geeta is also important part of the epic.

Though I can list more reasons to invalidate narrator's point. yet most profound and satisfying reason is the similarity between epic and human life. This reason provokes me to know and to read the epic with greater interests.

4 comments:

  1. Wonderful post you have here by approaching viewers through your best content with great knowledge. thanks for sharing and do keep up posting more.

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    1. Thanks Sabkon.Hope I could find something in future that is interesting to all of us.

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  2. What Mahabharata n all!!!! Although, it's an interesting story, I find the TV series boring. Not always, I would like to listen to the lectures, but a very few of them actually interest me.

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    1. I love TV series. Watching those arrows in the air and meeting to one another at war... Dresses of different people and tales, and reasoning all seems to be quite interesting and charming. The way tales are narrated by Time machine, it is all too interesting... But yeah tastes differ for each and everyone:-)

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