Gita

Published on 29th April, 2018, in Mid-day. The Gita is a part of the Mahabharata. It is the dialogue of 700 verses between Krishna and Arjuna just before the Kurukshetra War, where the Pandavas fight the Kauravas. This dialogue is found in the Bhisma Parva, one of the 18 books of the epic. Clearly, such a long and complex conversation could not have taken place at the crucial hour before the war. Some say, it takes place in a mystical time and space, and not in mundane history and geography. Others say, these verses are interpolations made by Brahmins later to include Vedanta philosophy in ..

Published on 22nd November, 2015, in Mid-Day. The elections in Bihar remind us no matter what the liberal elite and media intellectuals may think India/Bharat wants, the electorate has something else in mind. Different people want different things depending on their situations as well as their socio-economic status. Perhaps that is why the Bhagavad Gita has two endings: one for Arjuna, the royal prince, and one for Sanjaya, Dhritarashtra’s charioteer who transmits the Gita of Krishna, having overheard it using his telepathic powers, to his blind master. I speak of the two endings in the final chapter of my latest book My Gita (Rupa Publications). ..