Why did shakuni have to come to Hastinapur? His own gandhara folks believed that he wanted to take revenge against the Kauravas. They, however, knew nothing about shakuni’s disturbing secret and his actual intention. What was shakuni’s real motive? What was the secret he was trying to guard from the world with all his efforts? In Hastinapur, shakuni would get entrapped in an inescapable mesh of the past, the present, and the future. He could have freed himself from the tangle by cracking a particular riddle that he would only be able to solve too late. What was the riddle about? What made him finally realise that he had just been used? This is the untold story of shakti laced with love, desire, envy, Malice, and vengeance. This is a heart-rending chronicle of some grievously wounded people you can never hate, even if you fail to love or pity them.

Though the Kuru family survived on Vyasadeva’s seeds, he never belonged to the house. Moreover, being an ascetic, he was even exempted from obligations of the complicated dynamics of human relationships. This armed him with a ruthless dispassion and he could go on telling his stories with stoical detachment, free from any bias and uncontaminated by quintessential human dilemmas. But had any of his characters given his own account of the story, would not that have lent a different dimension to the events seducing ordinary mortals like us to identify, if not compare, our private crises with those of our much celebrated heroes? The Unfallen Pandava is an imaginary autobiography of Yudhishthira, attempting to follow the well-known story of the Mahabharata through his eyes. In the process of narrating the story, he examines his extremely complicated marriage and relationship with brothers turned co-husbands, tries to understand the mysterious personality of his mother in a slightly mother-fixated way, conducts manic and depressive evaluation of his own self and reveals his secret darkness and philosophical confusions with an innate urge to submit to a supreme soul. His own story lacks the material of an epic, rather it becomes like confession of a partisan who, prevailing over other more swashbuckling characters, finally discovers his latent greatness and establishes himself as the symbolic protagonist.

The Mahabharata is the more recent of India's two great epics, and by far the longer. First composed by the Maharishi Vyasa in verse, it has come down the centuries in the timeless oral tradition of guru and sishya, profoundly influencing the history, culture, and art of not only the Indian subcontinent but most of south-east Asia. At 100,000 couplets, it is seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined: far and away the greatest recorded epic known to man. The Mahabharata is the very Book of Life: in its variety, majesty and, also, in its violence and tragedy. It has been said that nothing exists that cannot be found within the pages of this awesome legend. The epic describes a great war of some 5000 years ago, and the events that led to it. The war on Kurukshetra sees ten million warriors slain, brings the dwapara yuga to an end, and ushers in a new and sinister age: this present kali yuga, modern times. At the heart of the Mahabharata nestles the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God. Senayor ubhayor madhye, between two teeming armies, Krishna expounds the eternal dharma to his warrior of light, Arjuna. At one level, all the restless action of the Mahabharata is a quest for the Gita and its sacred stillness. After the carnage, it is the Gita that survives, immortal lotus floating upon the dark waters of desolation: the final secret! With its magnificent cast of characters, human, demonic, and divine, and its riveting narrative, the Mahabharata continues to enchant readers and scholars the world over. This new rendering brings the epic to the contemporary reader in sparkling modern prose. It brings alive all the excitement, magic, and grandeur of the original-for our times.

Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse? In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world. Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.

Gandhari, the blindfolded queen-mother of the Kauravas, sees through it all... Gandhari has one day left to live. As she stares death in the face, her memories travel back to the beginning of her story, to life's unfairness at every point: A fiercely intelligent princess who wilfully blindfolded herself for the sake of her peevish, visually-impaired husband; who underwent a horrible pregnancy to mother one hundred sons, each as unworthy as the other; whose stern tapasya never earned her a place in people's hearts, nor commanded the respect that Draupadi and Kunti attained; who even today is perceived either as an ingratiatingly self-sacrificing wife or a bad mother who was unable to control her sons and was, therefore, partly responsible for the great war of the Mahabharata... In this insightful and sensitive portrayal, Aditi Banerjee rescues Gandhari from being reduced to a mere symbol of her blindfold. She builds her up, as Ved Vyasa did, as an unconventional heroine of great strength and iron will – who, when crossed, embarked upon a complex relationship with Lord Krishna, and became the queen who cursed a God...

The first book to cover Krishna’s entire life, from his childhood pranks to his final powerful acts in the Mahabharata war • Draws from the Bhagavad Purana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, and India’s sacred oral tradition • Shows how the stories of Krishna’s life are expressed with such simplicity and humor that they enable anyone--man, woman, or child--to see the wisdom of his teachings • Provides a valuable meditative tool that allows the lessons of these stories to illuminate from within Krishna, one of the most beloved characters of the Hindu pantheon, has been portrayed in many lights: a god-child, a prankster, a model lover, a divine hero, an exemplary ruler, and the Supreme Being. In The Complete Life of Krishna, Vanamali, a leading Krishna expert from a long line of prominent Krishna devotees, provides the first book in English or Sanskrit to cover the complete range of the avatar’s life. Drawing from the Bhagavad Purana, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, and India’s sacred oral tradition, Vanamali shares stories from Krishna’s birth in a dungeon and early days as a merry trickster in Vrindavana, through his time as divine ruler at Dwaraka, to his final powerful acts as the hero Arjuna’s charioteer and guru in the Kurukshetra war. She explains how Krishna became a mahayogi, the greatest of all yogis, and attained complete mastery over himself and nature. By integrating the hero-child with the mahayogi, the playful lover with the divine ruler, Vanamali shows how the stories of Krishna’s life are expressed with such simplicity and humor that they enable anyone--man, woman, or child--to see the wisdom of his teachings. This complete biography of the man who was also a god provides a valuable meditative tool allowing Krishna’s lessons to illuminate from within.