Anyone who has had a casual interest in the culture and tradition of India would not have missed hearing about the great epic called the Mahabharata. It is one of the two great epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana. While the Ramayana can be associated with the Hindu religion, the Mahabharata is largely secular. Although the Hindu god Krishna plays a prominent role in the story, the epic cannot be considered a religious work.
I consider the Mahabharata secular because it deals with the power struggle between the cousins. While the five brothers called Pandavas are the protagonists of this story, their cousins who number one hundred are their adversaries. Duryodhana, the eldest of the hundred brothers, hates his cousins, the Pandavas, and conspires to deprive them of their rightful share in the kingdom. He is so great with his cousins that he even makes some attempts on his life.
The story is woven through a complex web comprising various nodes and links. The history is very interesting. The story is so long and complex that everyone trying to tell it can present it in a unique way, without the overall story being distorted! Probably no other work in any language in the world has given rise to such great literature as the Mahabharata has.
While hundreds of narratives had been written faithfully following the original version written in Sanskrit by Vyasa, thousands of books had been written about this epic. These range from critical studies of the epic to creative works developed using some part of the epic as the basis or some of the epic’s characters as the focus.
The Mahabharata contains the Bhagawad Gita, popularly known as the Gita, which has become popular throughout the world for the wisdom it offers. The Gita carries the advice given by Lord Krishna on the battlefield, to Arjuna, one of the protagonists, when he expressed some reservations about fighting his cousins and other relatives for the good of the kingdom.
The essential wisdom of the Gita can be summed up as follows: “You should do your duty with dedication, without concern for the result. Doing what you do putting your heart into the task is Yoga. If you develop a mindset to do your best and accept any result you get, then you will have no reason to experience grievance.”