A Story About–What? Everything?

Yes. Everything. "A Story About Everything" is how this professor, Arti Dhand, describes The Mahabharata in her pandemic project, a podcast with 15-20 minute episodes that herds listeners onto the convoluted trail of this ancient story.

For another take on the story, see The Mahabharata: A Child's View by Samhita Arni, a text that has clarity and candor and a kind of touching freshness. That's because the writer was 10 years old when she began this project, so as a reader I have to come to this with an openness to that truthful child's heart.

But I will say, Arti Dhand's is the treatment I've been waiting for all my grownup life. Delivered orally, contextually, and in small bites. What I really like about this podcast is that it treats the Mahabharata as a literary text and not a religious one. So often in my Hindu upbringing, it was no more than the frame story for The Bhagavad Gita.

Why do I find this avowedly secular approach comforting? I think because it absolves me of having to draw moral conclusions every few minutes, or resist the ones the storyteller's pushing. I was never very good at accepting canned morality, whatever its source.

Finally, I wanted to learn about the art of this epic tale rather than tie myself into internal knots of conscience, because, you know, who needs more of those during a pandemic?

I've listened to 20-ish of the 40-something-and-still-ticking episodes. Let's just say I'm finding Arti's podcast as irreverent, pragmatic, and wildly imaginative as the story itself. And it's a lot of fun to hear the resonances between its parts, the repetitions of names and themes, and the casual tossing in of great philosophical questions left deliberately unanswered in a manner that seems familiar and relevant in the 21st century.