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- Okay, back to my book. Oh, and beer. Be well, peoples. 1 day ago
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thanks a lot for this!
I credit solely you for getting me interested in Mahabharat. After I started reading Bhim, I went off to read everything I could find on Mahabharat
Thank Karun, mate.
He did all the work of putting it all together.
Glad you liked it.
C’mon, don’t make it a big deal. It was routine copy-paste work, and it gave me another chance to go back and read the episodes!
[For those interested, I used pdf995 (www.pdf995.com) - a freeware with nifty features of creating table of contents with links - to convert the word document into PDF.]
Dear Mr.Karunakar
Can you pls send “Bhimsen Complete and unbridged” either PDF or WORD file to my email ID scsk68@yahoo.co.in as I could not download it even after several attempts. There is some problem I facing.
Thanks for your help and sorry for the inconvenience and a directly addressing this to you.
thanks
sukumar
The entire series was really wonderful…have given print out’s of the series to a lot of friends and relatives …all of them have really liked it…would appreciated ur take on Gurcharan das’ book on the Mahabharata…
Found it fairly ordinary — it is, IMHO, a column that unfortunately became a book.
He spent a lot of time reading the Mahabharat and related works. That’s fine.
He argues that in the Mahabharat can be found parallels to contemporary human behavior. And that is fine, too.
I have a problem with two aspects of the book, though. The first is that he strains the parallel to breaking point — perhaps nowhere as ridiculously as when he concocts a dice chamber episode out of Manmohan Singh as Bhisma, the Congress as the Kauravas and Pratibha Patil as god only knows what. That is only the most strained of the examples, btw; there are others that you likely stumbled on too.
The second, and larger, problem is that it is structurally flawed. Each chapter is given over to an extensive retelling of some storyline from the epic — and then the contemporary “parallel” is tacked on to the latter part of the chapter. Makes for a clunky read.
Thanks Prem for the series and Karun for the compilation. I am now reading Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindu” after learning about the book from your article.
Thanks Prem and Karunakaran.
Thanks Prem and Karunakaran for putting this up..interesting read.
After reading “Palace of Illusions”, this book(pdf) seems to be the next logical step. And I am glad to have read it.
Lovely…
Have you thought about getting the book published? We desperately need nuanced, POV re-tellings of the Mahabharat in the English language. It’s sad that people seem to know the complete Middle Earth mythology and every word of the Harry Potter series, but ask them about the Mahabharat and all they remember is “5 Good Pandavs Vs 100 Evil Kauravs”. Linear, omniscient tellings like The Mahabharata by Ramesh Menon fail to bring out the complexity of the story, and further they burden the reader with every tangential, add-on story they can.
The situation is so bad that there are people raving about Palace Of Illusions as “brilliant”.
And Isn’t it ‘brilliant’?
unfortunately no. In fact, I was completely disappointed, so much so that I actively warn everyone I can against reading it. However, I accept that mine is a biased view (I like the Kauravas better than the Pandavas), so here is a balanced review of POI: http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2008/04/palace-of-illusions-good-bad-and.html
P.S Read the comments on that post too.
I liked the book, mainly for its ability to ‘force’ the reader to look at the woman’s perspective. Not without any flaws, this book still undoes some harm inflicted upon us by the conventional stories of Mahabharata.
And as far as Kauravas are concerned, we do need a stronger writing to express ‘their’ point of view, and all these books (which I have read) have done nothing to enlighten me.
I’m with Vedang on Palace of Illusions. When you try to force some point of view on someone, it rebounds badly.
For instance, I could have *forced* you to confront the fact that there are logical alternatives to the supernatural tropes of the Mahabharat, but that would end up being off putting. Instead, if you focus on just telling the story, from whatever point of view, the reader will make the other connections for himself/herself. Divakarunni’s point is that she gets almost shrill with the feminist angle, to the detriment of character development and story telling.
When I used the word ‘Force’ , it was just to emphasize the fact that there was some pointer to the woman’s perspective. It needn’t necessarily mean that you ‘have’ to agree to that POV. When we are willing to hear the other side, things become easier to absorb. From what I know and have observed, people are quite rigid when it comes to epics. The stereotypes of being a DharamPurush, Daanveer, etc… make it difficult for other views to get accommodated.
Excellent perspective. I first read the excerpt on sharing Draupadi in some weekend supplement. Somehow, it seemed to be the only logical way to explain it. And yet, all these years we’ve lived by some higher spiritual reason for Yudi’s very flawed actions. He was as Dharam Raj as Deve Gowda is a Humble Farmer
Unfortunately, this re-telling is safe as a PDF. The day it gets published and popular, you’ll have a fatwa on your heads! (I’m almost joking….)
“this re-telling is safe as a PDF. The day it gets published and popular, you’ll have a fatwa on your heads!”
Couldn’t have agreed more!!!
Yes, well, it will become a book one of these days/years; then we’ll see.
Somewhat fancy the idea of having a few Black Cats — as opposed to black cats — following me around. *L*
This is by far the most realistic and sensible version of Mahabharata I have read. I appreciate you sticking to the POV in-spite of major temptation that the story creates at various points. Good determination. All through the read I wanted to read others POVs also. Any such plans?
I recommended this to lot of cousins who shared with me those childhood bed-time stories that my great grand mother told us.
Just one word… Thank you!
+1 on that. I oft quote this POV instead of Ramanand Sagar’s version now. Very well written and it’s great to see that you have humanised the epic and made everything much more feasible
I agree with Puja..its not about how well Chitra did her job, but the fact is she sharply brought into focus the woman’s point of view.
In fact the caste and gender issues trouble me most about the Mahabharath.I read Mrityunjay hoping to see the caste point addressed, but was disappointed..its mostly about saying Karna was not really low caste,…doing nothing to wipe away caste differences.
The caste/gender oint is the troubling part of the Eternal Dharma perspectives;so much of it has stood the test of time, but the unjustness of this rankles. So if Chitra is shrill, its understandable–and she has brought in new readership!
Kept quoting P L to the better half without trying to teach Marathi. Partly owing to Bhim, managed to translate a favourite piece http://wp.me/pRgJz-3F
I want to thank you for bringing Bhimsen to non-Malayalam speakers. I have heard of this book from Malyalee friends for long, but because there was no English translation, i could not access it. And such a wonderful translation, so easy and so contemperory. Thank you for enriching English lit!!!
Finished reading Bhimsen yesterday.. I ahve not read the original Mahabharath neither MT’s Randamoozham…. how similar is your Bhimsen to both of these?
Hi Prem,
I have been following your writing from 1995 and really find this very interesting. I remember that I once communicated with you over one live election coverage … I have read your Bhim series and infact even my folks have read it (this is esp a big deal since my mom reads very little english stuff … she prefers Kannada over english any time). I hope you are enjoying my city Bangalore.
thanks premetta
Thank you very much for this translation ! You have done a great service to a large number of malayalees like me who grew up outside Kerala and have looked wistfully at the malayalam copy of ‘Randammoozham’ and wished that there was an English translation….
Prem, thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve been looking for the English translation of Randaamoozham, and just came back disappointed. It’s been at least 10 years since I read the original masterpiece, and I have only read through some fifteen only pages of your work. Is it a translation? Or your own rendering of MT’s work? I cant tell the difference!
Sending this link along to all that I know. No one should be deprived of the privilege of reading one of the best retelling of an epic, ever.
Benny
Thank you Prem Panicker for putting this together. I have not read any other mahabharat translation or transliteration and stumbled on this from jaiarjun singh’s blog, by the way i love jaiarjun’s writing on movies. This bhimsen is so much real and wonderful and extraordinary , if I may say that, than the cartoon character he is been depicted in many movies and TV serials from where my knowledge of mahabharat comes from
. I really want to read a good similar work in english from Karan’s point of view. Karan has been my hero from very little I know of his character again from mostly TV serial and little story I heard from my grandma. please do recomend some.
Thank you again!
I’m sorry, with all due respect, your ebook is strictly ok. It is dry, filled with grammatical errors, and doesn’t really infuse much emotion. I have read Kannada and Sanskrit versions that actually do justice to the great Mahabharata. You really can’t understand the magnanimity of Bhimsen from this book – this book is simple, and should go into something like Balbharati – children’s textbooks. You will not find nuances or complexity of character here. Divakaruni’s book has infused life, and offers relatable emotions, and adds facets of human behaviour – jealousy, passion, love, and grandeur.