QUESTIONS AND CONSOLATIONS

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”?