Skip to main content

The Difficulty of Being Good


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Book Review

Title: The Difficulty of Being Good
Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin India, 2012

The Mahabharata is an epic that can be interpreted in numerous ways.  As Gurcharan Das says, “It is a cosmic allegory of the eternal struggle between good and evil on one plane.  At another level, it is about an all-too-human fight between the cousins of a royal family, which leads to a war and ends tragically in the death of almost everyone.  At a third level – and this is primarily the subject of my book – it is about the crisis of conscience of some of its characters.”

Das spent six years studying the epic, having taken an “academic holiday” from his successful career as a writer.  Before turning to fulltime writing, Das worked with multinational companies.  The prevalence of evil in the world of human beings set Das on a kind of spiritual quest.  The Difficulty of Being Good was the outcome. 

The book is an intellectual, spiritual, moral, philosophical and psychological exploration of one of India’s greatest epics.  It deserves to be read by anyone who wishes to understand the Mahabharata from a very wide perspective.  Anyone who is put off by the burgeoning darkness of evil in the world should read this book. 

It does not provide any solution to the problem of evil.  There isn’t any solution.  But we can learn how to deal with evil and keep ourselves good.  Quoting Machiavelli Das says, “a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not so good.”  When the patriarch Bhishma said that dharma was subtle, he meant little else. 

The Mahabharata shows how difficult it is to be good in a world of ‘bad’ people.  Yudhishthira tried his best to cling on to what he perceived as his dharma but failed to avoid the war and all the killings.  Yudhishthira’s dharma was based on benevolence, compassion and generosity.  Krishna, an avatar of God Vishnu himself, used many devious strategies and deceptions in order to defeat the Kauravas.  Even God would find it difficult to be good in the world of human affairs. 

What is our duty then?  That’s what Das’s book tries to answer.  It succeeds in providing a convincing answer too.  It is worth reading the book whether one is religious or not.  The insights provided in the book are not based on any particular religion.  Das brings in a whole spectrum of knowledge ranging from classic literature to contemporary economic views, from philosophy to psychology.   The best thing about it is its lucidity in spite of the profundity.

The books shows how religious literature should be read and interpreted.  That one reason alone should be enough for one to read it.  
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ravish ManiNovember 12, 2014 at 12:07 PM

    From your review, it seems that it is a must read for me. Thanks for sharing.

    Well... as far as I understand Mahabharata, there isn't any distinguish between good and bad, Both are miseries in context of human beings. It deals with Transcendence - Rising beyond Good & Bad.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 12, 2014 at 7:01 PM

      It is the transcendence that Das is driving at, Ravish. You will love the book for that reason. But transcendence has to be pragmatic too for the ordinary mortals. And Das manages to be practical. The reason is that he was on a genuine quest. That's why I recommend the book.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
16 comments
Read more

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more