Sons of Gods: The Mahabharata Retold

As promised, I've published Chapter 58: The Song of God as a blog page above. To understand what is happening here one really needs to have read the Mahabharata, but the Gita is important  that it has taken on a life as its own: 18 chapters of sublime wisdom, known  as a major world scripture in its own right. For Hindus it's the equivalent of the Bible. There are many translations, of course, and I certainly have not read them all in order to make a choice as to which is the best. The version I own is a translation by W. J. Johnson published by the Oxford University Press. The chapter 58 of Sons of Gods is a much condensed version of the Gita, and not a translation of a selection of verses: it's what I believe to be the essence of Krishna's message to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Much as I would have loved to include the entire Gita, doing so would have broken the word limit I had set for myself and held...

Recently a friend asked me why I had done this; why rewrite a work that already has so many versions out there? What, if anything, makes this English Mahabharata different? Playing devil's advocate, she asked: surely it's idle vanity to put yet a new edition into the mix -- with a new author and even a new title? (image: Karna's chariot wheel sinks into the earth.) I'll answer the first question first, and give you a task: look up any current edition of the Mahabharata and seek a synopsis of the story. Inevitably you will find some version of the following: "The Mahabharata is the story of a family feud in ancient India, culminating in a terrible war. The five Pandava brothers, under the protection of Krishna, an Incarnation of God, have been cheated of the kingdom that is rightly theirs, and must fight not only to win it back but to reestablish righteousness in the world. " And that is, indeed, the core story in a nutshell. But it's no...