The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

Gurcharan Das

Allen Lane

Pages: 434

Rs 699

Gurcharan Das is a multi-talented man. He has been a successful business leader, an author of plays and novels and the book India Unbound, which told the world that India had arrived. Now he has taken on the difficult task of reading the Mahabharata and interpreting its many messages in light of contemporary circumstances.

Unlike many people in their dotage, who turn to religion and spout untutored nonsense, Das took his task seriously. He took out a year of his life and went to the University of Chicago to study the Mahabharata critically. It is a dying shame of the Indian university system that even to study a Sanskrit classic, there is no institution with the library facilities or the Sanskrit expertise that Chicago has.

The result is a book rich in ideas. Das does not retell the story as has often been done. He takes episodes and characters who pose moral and ethical questions. Why is Duryodhana so envious, how could every male of the Kuru clan sit passively as Draupadi, in her menstrual state and wearing but a single garment, was physically assaulted, indeed all but publicly raped by Dushasana, why was Yudhishthira so meek and why did he later agree to a war of genocidal proportions? Arjun’s hesitation is well known but there is also Bhishma’s self-abnegation, Karna’s resentment at the injustice meted out to him because he is just an OBC and then there is Krishna’s willingness to play dirty to win, Ashwatthama’s heinous killing of the five Pandava children etc.

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