Ajaya: Duryodhana's Mahabharata - Collector's Edition

by Anand Neelakantan

The next time you read Vyasa’s great epic, read with your eyes open. I shall be there with you whenever the story is told. I will be standing near you, whispering to your conscience to read between the lines. When you watch plays glorifying the Pandavas and their dharma, you will feel the gnawing of doubt in your mind. Know that I am that doubt. When you pray, you will see the lamp flicker; I am the breeze that makes it dance. Do not say I have not warned you. As long as the great epic is read, Aswathama will live, the Brahmin cursed with immortality will be there, looking over your shoulder. You will not see me, but I will possess your mind. I am immortal doubt and reason for I am cursed with a mind of my own.”

for their karma or actions. Everything happens due to some cause. Only time can reveal whether one has acted as per dharma or not.

The epic keeps throwing up questions and from every answer more questions sprout up. There is no absolute right or wrong in Vyasa’s Mahabharata, echoed in Shakespeare’s line from Hamlet: There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

But everyone and every faith has a place in the great mosaic of our culture. Nothing is absolutely right or wrong.

Stories, I believe, should be about questions, never about answers. Every answer should give birth to a hundred questions. That is the mark of a confident civilisation and that is how we, the sons and daughters of Bharatavarsha, have always celebrated our stories – with debate, argument and counterargument. Certainly not by accepting without dissent.