Mahabharata - R.K. Narayan

I know that this post will most likely come off as incredibly nerdy and/or snooty. Not much to be done about that.

Mahabharata was next on my list because I've been trying to dig a little deeper into the Indian experience that I find myself living at the moment. That and my husband was nagging me (in a good way sweetie!) to read it. We picked a simple version by R.K. Narayan as a starter. For those unfamiliar, the Mahabharata is an old Indian text that is a commentary on how society should function together. For the uninitiated to Indian culture, it's like a delightfully frustrating maze in which you have to go back and try again a few times, even though it seems simple. Much like learning Hindi. Thankfully, this version is short and features simple language. There are as many authors of the Mahabharata as there are authors that wanted to create it, and it has been a constantly evolving text, changed more than a few times over to suit both the times and the location where the author was from. The Mahabharata is beautiful because it's so deep. If you want to get progressively harder (all the way up do damn, this is impossible), there are many, many versions that become progressively longer and more complicated to understand. Seriously. You can wander all the way up to the Sanskrit version. Unless you're a Sanskrit professor, you probably won't be able to read it though. I'm not going to be arrogant and declare that I'll get just below Sanskrit, because that's just ridiculous. I do, however want to get a slightly more complicated version. One of the things I found frustrating about R.K. Narayan's version of this book was that while it challenged me to pay attention, it also glossed over many, if not all of the story and kept it very superficial. My husband and I have on many occasions gotten into discussions about this story and I can feel aspects of it that are missing in this book.

Verdict:

Amazing version for beginners if you have any interest/inclination to dig into Indian culture and ethos. For those who already know the story or have already read it, this won't cut it.