Lendle

In a nutshell it is an Indian story of Cousin's War that takes place more than two to three thousand years ago. I have read and heard narrations of Mahabharata in three Indian languages; Telugu, Oriya, Hindi as well as tried reading it aloud in English to my 10 year old. It is very hard for any Indian well versed in another Indian language to relish reading it in English. To use another metaphor,may be as discomforting as it will be for a Chinese person, adept at using chopsticks, to eat noodles with fork and spoon. Hence all the panning and bad marks heaped on this book from many readers who claim Rajagopalachari or RK Narayan or some other Indian has written better versions. Yet for anyone totally uninitiated in ancient Indian mythologies and epics as many of my current friends are, this happens to be a very succintly written version that conveys the essence. Yes, there are a few inaccuracies like Arjuna, in stead of his son Abhimanyu, marrying Virata's daughter Uttara and omissions of many sub plots like Ekalavya's triumphant self taught archery and devotion to a virtual teacher. But author himself has acknowledged that it is not a scholarly transliteration, and I am glad he made it more readable in the process. Even Tolstoy is accused of historical inaccuracies while creating a masterpiece called "War and Peace". I always like to compare Mahabharata with Tolstoy's epic novel with its multitude of characters and centrality of war as a metaphor for human life for those who have not yet been familiar with either of them. Anyone who has grown up in India may have been exposed to Mahabharata in one form or another, including many movies, one of the good ones made by Peter Brooks and a popular TV series in late 1980s. Yet; I could open any page in William Buck's Mahabharata and read it to enjoy the story. His English rendition is more palatable than the Indianized idioms of many other translators. In his short lifespan of 37 years he seems to have fallen in love with the Indian epics of Mahbharata and Ramayana after discovering them in a Nebraska library and translated them for the uninitiated. However my best version happens to be what my late uncle(he would have been 90 years old now) used to narrate to us during long evenings of summer vacation get-togethers of myriads of cousins. Alas we did not have access to even a basic tape recorder to record at least one his many evenings' narration of Mahabharata(he used to break it in to 12-18 episodes);where princes in disguise were meeting their consorts in forests, getting married and begetting children instantly by only touching tongues; his simplification of the whole process for the minors in the audience. My uncle and narrators like him spanning many generations of Indians added color to the story in their native languages and in the process enriched the narrative and rendered it more enjoyable, long before writing materials and the scholars came to codify an authorised version. Hence I will strongly recommend William Buck's version of Mahabharata as the next best thing to having an audio cassette of my own uncle's narration in Telugu. Hope the publishers release an E-book version so that one can easily search for an episode for its topicality in a day's event. Wish they could also hire someone like Roshan Seth to read it as an audio book CD or audible.com for the road.

The Great Bharata of Vyasa, comprising over 100,000 Sanskrit stanzas organized into eighteen volumes, contains within its vast length many stories - of gods and demigods, of kings and warriors, of legend, history, ethics, philosophy, law, politics, and religion. Within all its richness lies a core story of the great civil war between the Kurus and the Pandavas, two rival branches of the Bharata lunar clan, culminating in the terrible Battle of Kurukshetra, an Armageddon which wiped out both sides in the fighting and ushered in the degenerate Fourth Age of Mankind, in which we are all living today.