I found myself reading ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’ (by Gurcharan Das) a few
days after I received it as a gift and had many attached expectations since it
is based on the modern day interpretation of Mahabharata, which in my opinion,
is an omniscient saga and has elements that not only intrigue a reader but also
simultaneously impart complex noesis.
Reading it was tedious; almost as if it’s a daily newspaper
article that won’t end! Besides the in-between excerpts and incidents it seemed
to me an extremely diluted and superficial take on the epic. I didn’t come
across it as a book that would shake you up, make you giggle or weep or even
impact in any way. I can say I was wrong.
Three more days into leading a ‘normal’ (read mundane) life with
the book read lingering, things started to change. Little questions that
remained unanswered every evening of the monsoon laden summer days started to
surface with unsatisfying but relieving answers, only to be challenged again and
tossed into limbo. The dilemma and self contradictory sermons juxtaposed with
the main story-line culminated into epiphanies and baby-step progress in
finding inner peace.
Prima facie, we always like it when we find someone who has
been there where we are today, and to have characters that had descended from the
Gods, to be perplexed, undergo injustice and follow it with undesirable
retribution; one certainly has a chance to find a road to self-forgiveness. But
without risking my tone to be pessimistic, I see that there is more to this
feeling than plain content.
To know that life is a function of previous and this life’s
Karma and that it never will come as an easy choice to do ‘the right thing’, instills
the seeds of stoicism we might not be ready to embrace. Seeing the world now in
several shades that Mahabharata and this book depict, deep down, one would know
that ends and means are fully intertwined to be understood separately. It populates
the array of open-ended questions,confusions; further intensifying the ride of
disillusionment, bringing elation and infliction in turns.
There is one statement in the Book that can take anyone by
storm.. In the end, when everyone passes over to the other world, its only Yudhisthir and Duryodhan that land in heaven!! This one revelation is beyond my complete understanding.
If we were to simply ‘do’ what we were destined to, to culminate our souls' journey successfully, then how can we ever
justify our sense of this (mere) illusion of control? How,then, the very fact
that we talk about life,death,revenge and fulfillment make any realistic sense?
Somehow this might help us make peace with our agonizing circumstances but can
it bring even a speck of a smile on a face that was marred lifelong with the tumultuous
bitterness of poverty,misfortune and haplessness? A myriad of questions and a
bagful of consolations, hasn’t this always been what we call “life”?
