i had gone yesterday to Chennai for the huge youth fest "Saarang" in IIT Madras... so i stopped in Landmarks on the way and bought Yuganta.. its such a small book, but i felt it raised a lot of valid points to ponder..

in this book, the author tries to anayse the minds and motives of various prominent characters of the Mahabharata.. i dint agree with all of her views, but still overall, i felt that it was very very well written..

this book is the English translation of the actual work, which was in Marathi and won the Sahitya Academy award for best work in English...

a must read for all those who are interested in the Mahabharata..

[well, who isn't??? ]

Very true.

I just finished reading it, and for the most part, I have a bone to pick with the way she says that Draupadi brought part of her problem on herself by "nitpicking about the finer points of dharma" after she's dragged into the assembly. For crying out loud, her husbands didn't do or say anything, none of the elders did or said anything, I think she has a right to attempt to defend herself. Heck, I even wouldn't mind if she attempted to belabour Dushasan with something a la Sita in Bridge of Rama with those chains.

i agree... that article reeked of chauvinism!!!!

pretty ironic that it was a woman who wrote it, huh??

Oh well, to each his own (or rather, in this case, to her own). It is easy to attach blame to everyone, I mean, Draupadi did insult Duryodhan rather severely in the Maya sabha, so to some degree, she is to blame. However, behind it all, we know that Krishna was manipulating everyone and everything to engineer that maha yuddha, to rid the earth of rulers like Duryodhan, Shishupal, Jarasandha, etc. I've also heard theories that he was the first Indian proponent of democracy (the Yadavas didn't have a king, they had what appeared to be a council of some kind with a chieftain-type figure), and that the war was engineered to break the power of the monarchies. In the end, it was the Yadavas who entered the power vacuum. Krishna's grandnephew Parikshit became king of Hastinapura and his great-grandson Vajra took Indraprastha (Vajra being his grandson Aniruddha's son... the Vajra part being a bit of a theory I think, I believe I read it in Maggi Lidchi Grassi's Mahabharat).