Understanding contemporary India through Mahabharat’s moral dilemmas

Spiritual Meditations
	Understanding contemporary India through Mahabharat's moral dilemmas
	After spending six years continuously with the epic, I have learned that the Mahabharata is about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day to day lives. But is this moral blindness an intractable human condition, or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state also treats us, and can we re-design our institutions to have a more accountable government? I have sought answers to these questions in the epic's elusive concept of dharma, and my own search for how we ought to live has been this book's motivating force. The Mahabharata is unique in engaging with the world of politics. India's philosophical traditions have tended to devalue the realm of human action, which deals with the world of 'appearances' not of reality. Indeed, a central episode in the epic dramatises the choice between moral purity and human action. King Yudhishthira feels guilty after the war for 'having killed those who ought not to be killed.' He feels trapped between the contradictory pulls of ruling a state and of being good, and wants to leave the world to become a non-violent ascetic. -- Gurcharan Das The Immorality of Silence Remorse and Rahul Gandhi Yudhishthira and Narendra Modi
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