The Essential Mahabharata - AR Krishnasastri - Translated by Arjun Bharadwaj and Hari Ravikumar

There are some books that you read for the story. And then there are books that come to you at a particular point in your life and mean much more than the story they tell.

The Essential Mahabharata was one such book for me.

This book is an English translation of A. R. Krishnashastri's Vachana Bharatha, a book I had read during my school days. So, when I picked this one up, the Mahabharata itself was certainly not new to me. 

There were no twists in the tale. 

And yet, this was probably one of the most meaningful books I read.

I read it soon after I had experienced a personal tragedy in my life. I was grieving, and grief had altered my sense of what was normal and real.

Strangely, it was this very familiar story that helped bring me back to my senses and to reality.

Perhaps it was because I already knew the Mahabharata well. Reading this rendition felt like returning to something familiar and reassuring. At several points, I found myself going back to the time when I had first read Vachana Bharatha as a school student.

There was comfort in that nostalgia.

But there was something more.

Somewhere along the way, while reading this book, I returned to God.

Grief can make us question many things we have always believed in. It did that to me too. But as I travelled once again with these familiar characters and their struggles, their losses, their questions and their faith, I slowly found my own faith returning.

It wasn't a sudden revelation. Nor did the book provide answers to everything I was struggling with. Rather, it reminded me of something I had perhaps lost sight of in my grief – that there are things in life beyond our understanding, that not everything that happens to us will have an explanation, and that faith sometimes begins where our ability to find answers ends.

The Mahabharata is, after all, a story filled with loss.

Its characters lose kingdoms, children, parents, siblings, teachers, friends and almost everything they once considered permanent. Even victory comes with enormous grief. Nobody really emerges from the Mahabharata untouched by loss.

And yet, life continues.

People grieve. They question. They become angry. They struggle with what has happened to them. And eventually, they find a way to accept reality and move forward.

Reading that while dealing with my own grief had an impact on me that I probably would not have experienced had I read the this book at a different point in my life.

And somewhere through that reading, I found myself returning to the central question of the Mahabharata:

What is Dharma?

When you read the Mahabharata when you are young, you tend to remember the story – the Pandavas and Kauravas, Draupadi, Bhishma, Karna, Krishna, the game of dice, the exile and, eventually, Kurukshetra.

When you return to it much later in life, Dharma takes on a different meaning.

What is the right thing to do when life doesn't unfold the way you expected?

How do you accept something you cannot change?

How do you continue to fulfil your responsibilities when you are carrying grief?

And how do you find your way back to faith?

The Mahabharata has never allowed Dharma to be simple.

What is right for one person may conflict with the duty of another. A promise made with the best of intentions can have terrible consequences. A person we consider righteous can make questionable choices, while someone seemingly on the wrong side can demonstrate extraordinary loyalty and generosity.

Sometimes there simply isn't a choice that is completely right.

Reading The Essential Mahabharata did not change my understanding of Dharma. Instead, it reinforced many of my older beliefs about what defines Dharma.

Perhaps Dharma is not always about finding the perfect answer. Sometimes it is about accepting the reality in front of us, doing what needs to be done, and continuing the journey.

And perhaps faith is not about understanding why everything happens. It is about trusting God even when we don't understand.

Those thoughts meant a lot more to me this time. 

The story hadn't changed. I had.

This time, the Mahabharata did much more than tell me a story I knew. It helped me cope with grief. It brought me to reality. It made me think again about Dharma.

And most importantly, it brought me back to God.

For that, The Essential Mahabharata will always remain a very special book for me.

The Secret of Secrets - Dan Brown

It has been a while since I read a Dan Brown book, and The Secret of Secrets reminded me why I enjoy his books so much.

Robert Langdon is back, and this time the story takes us to Prague, where he is accompanying Katherine Solomon. Katherine is about to present research that could fundamentally change the way we understand human consciousness. And, as you would expect in a Dan Brown novel, things don't quite go according to plan.

What follows is the familiar Dan Brown combination of science, history, mystery, secret organisations, codes, symbols and a race against time. But what made this book particularly interesting to me was the subject at the centre of it all – consciousness.

Can consciousness exist independently of our physical body?

What happens to consciousness when the body dies?

Can our consciousness have a non-local experience – something that cannot be explained by the physical location of our brain or body?

These are questions that have fascinated people for centuries, but they also resonate with something I personally believe in – that there is an afterlife and that when consciousness leaves the body, it can have a non-local experience.

So, unlike some of Dan Brown's earlier books where I was mainly following Langdon through the mystery, in this book I found myself connecting with the underlying idea as well.

And that made the book a very enjoyable read for me. I enjoyed practically every page.

Of course, this is still Dan Brown, so philosophical questions alone aren't enough. There has to be a conspiracy somewhere!

One particular construct in the story surprised me – the idea of taking this understanding of consciousness and turning it into a technology that could potentially be used to spy on enemy nations.

I certainly didn't expect the story to go in that direction.

At first, the jump from consciousness and the afterlife to espionage sounds rather far-fetched. But within the world Dan Brown creates, the storyline worked surprisingly well for me. He manages to take an idea that is philosophical, spiritual and scientific and ask a very different question:

What if someone discovered that it could actually be weaponised?

That twist adds another dimension to the book. A discovery about the nature of human existence would not remain merely an academic or spiritual discovery. Governments, intelligence agencies and powerful organisations would immediately start thinking about what else it could be used for.

And perhaps that is not so far-fetched after all!

Dan Brown's books have always lived somewhere at the intersection of fact, speculation and imagination. You know while reading them that you shouldn't necessarily accept everything as fact, but he gives you just enough history and science to make you wonder, "What if?"

The Secret of Secrets did that for me.

It gave me the usual Robert Langdon adventure that I expected, but it also dealt with a subject that I already find fascinating. More importantly, it left me thinking about consciousness, death and what might exist beyond our physical bodies even after I had finished the book.

And that, for me, is what makes a good Dan Brown novel.

A thoroughly enjoyable read – and one that resonated with me at a very personal level.