Sons of Gods: The Mahabharata Retold

I was in London last week and took the opportunity to visit Watkin's Spiritual Bookshop in Cecil Place, just off Charing Cross Road. I was looking for a copy of Kamala Subramaniam's Mahabharata . I felt I need to own this book; after all, it was my own inspiration, so many years ago, and to it I owe the planting of the Mahabharata seed in my mind, a seed that has sprouted and grown throughout the years. Back then, I had borrowed the book from an ashram library in India. I borrowed it again and again throughout that year, read it over and over till I knew it almost by heart. So, I ought to buy it. Own it. There's a second reason I needed to have that book. Though I know that I wrote Sons of Gods from my own memory, without a reference book open to help me, I was afraid that, just maybe, some of the words from my source might have buried themselves into my unconscious and emerged just as they were. To the onlooker, that might be interpreted as plagiarism. After all, I...

The "Great Bharata" of Vyasa comprises over 100,000 Sanskrit stanzas organized into eighteen volumes. With about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is one of the longest epic poems in the world, about ten times the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, roughly five times longer than Dante's Divine Comedy, and about four times the size of the other Indian epic, the Ramayana.  Within this vastness lies a net of countless stories, one story leading into another and that into another, a veritable mine of ancient Hindu folktales, myths and legends that serve to illuminate the ancient Hindu concept of dharma and adharma: righteous, dutiful, virtuous, wise living versus unrighteous, ignorant living. At its core is the conflict between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, two rival branches of the Lunar clan, culminating in the horrific civil war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, a holocaust which wiped out the entire warrior caste and ushered in the de...