Note: This is a revised version of the article “The Tale of Belalasena: A Unique Perspective in Sarala Mahabharata” published in Samachar Just Click on March 28, 2024.   Key words: Sarala Mahabharata, Krishna, Bhima, Belalasena, maya     The story of Belalasena occurs in Sarala Mahabharata. In Vyasa Mahabharata, there is no Belalasena story or an equivalent of it. Belalasena was Bhima’s son. Let us set aside details about his meeting Krishna on his way to the battlefield and about why he not just happily, but with great devotion too, gave his head to Krishna, when he aske ..read more

This is to say that my book “Life’s Little Tales” has been published. It was published in April this year. It is published by Sikshasandhan, ND – 7, VIP Area, IRC Village, Bhubaneswar – 751015. Tel: 074- 2556109, Fax: 0674- 751015.Email: sikshasandhan@gmail.com Website: www.sikshasandhan.org.in Price: Rs 195/   This book is a collection of twenty one short essays. Written in a casual and narrative mode, these personal and reflective essays are about an Odia village boy’s growing up: his negotiating with his world, relishing its beauty and facing its challenges, and trying to make sense of ..read more

  Kunti and Gandhari never had an easy relationship. It was bound to be so. Kunti wanted her eldest son, Yudhisthira, inherit the throne of Hastinapura whereas her sister-in-law, Gandhari, wanted her eldest son, Duryodhana, to do so. But neither encouraged their children to be hostile to their cousins; in fact, on occasions, Gandhari harshly scolded Duryodhana for his hostility towards the Pandavas, as Kunti did Bhima, equally harshly. After the wax palace fire happened, in which the Pandavas and Kunti were believed to have perished, Duryodhana was enthroned as the king of Hastinapura. Ku ..read more

  About a month ago, I listened for a while to a television debate in Odia on the decision, presumably by the Government of Madhya Pradesh, to include Ramayana and Mahabharata as elective subjects in the first year Engineering programme in that state. The assumption of both the participants, both young (which was a good thing), was that these are religious works. This piece disagrees but it does not enter into this debate. Incidentally, at many of our universities, IIT and IIMS, in elective courses in literature (including comparative literature), philosophy, history, culture, leadership ..read more

The Pandavas were already there in the lakshya griha (wax palace) in Varunavanta. Uncle Vidura had met them and advised them to live in the forest for some years. Life would be very hard there, he said, by way of preparing them for their time in the forest. They would even have to beg for food, but suffering must not break them, he said. Someday the kingdom of Hastinapura would be theirs, he told them. The Pandavas knew that Vidura had got a tunnel made for them to escape. Now Vidura told them that there would be a boatman to ferry them across the river, Suranadi. At the other end of the river ..read more

Was it morally justified for Duryodhana to go to war against the Pandavas? Did he really hope to win? Had he carefully weighed his chances of victory? Had he under-estimated the strength of the enemy? Forget about the cause, forget about the principles, if he had felt unsure about winning, it was certainly very unethical on his part to go to war, going by the logic of Yudhisthira, the embodiment of virtue. Preparations for the conclusive war were going on. One day, as he was conferring with Krishna and his brothers, the eldest Pandava asked Sahadeva, who had the knowledge of the past and the ..read more

  Link for the Video Lectures below: “The Tradition of Retelling of the (Vyasa) Mahabharata: An In-Depth Study of Odia Mahabharatas”.  10 Lectures Prepared, in 2019, at IIT Kanpur for Swayam Prabha, free DTH Channel for Education. Telecast in January, 2020. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Dg2OSRexFgbm-V_9MKe0Dsbb6I5iKUuQ?usp=sharing Friends, these lectures constitute a course. The lectures are a bit loosely connected. Deliberately. That is, one does not necessarily have to listen to the earlier lecture(s) to understand a particular lecture.  I most cordially invite you ..read more

I have posted a manuscript - Ruminating Sarala Mahabharata -  the link to which is the following: https://works.bepress.com/bibudhendra_patnaik/17/ Written more than ten years ago, this manuscript was partially edited (the first 50 pages) two years ago. It is also incomplete. The last chapter is yet to be written. I hope I will re-work on this manuscript some day soon. I have posted it in this incomplete and unedited form all the same. Barring, perhaps, a very few, this manuscript deals with episodes not discussed elsewhere, to the best of my knowledge ..read more

 V DHRITARASTRA’S ANGUISH   In the darkness of the night, Duryodhana, rattled, scared, intensely lonely and blood all over his body, fled from the battlefield. All his brothers had been killed, as had been Sakuni, his mighty generals and other celebrated warriors and his beloved son, Lakshmana Kumara. He directly went to Bhishma, lying on a bed of arrows, waiting for the auspicious moment to come when he would wish for his death. Duryodhana told him that he had lost everyone in the war and had come to him to take refuge in him. He prayed to him to save him. A kshatriya does not aban ..read more

 IV VIDURA"S SILENCE For the Great War at Kurukshetra there was no one person in Sarala Mahabharata who everyone blamed as being solely or primarily responsible. For Gandhari and Dhritarastra, it was Sakuni - when the war was on. After the war, when she saw Krishna, she told him that he was solely responsible for the war since it was entirely within his powers not to allow the war to happen in the first place - no one would have gone against his words had he firmly told everyone concerned that there was to be no war. Arjuna squarely blamed Duryodhana, but the venerable Kuru elder, Bhish ..read more