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The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, by Gurcharan Das
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Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse?
In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world.
Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.
- Sales Rank: #289699 in Books
- Published on: 2010-10-01
- Released on: 2010-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.10" h x 1.20" w x 9.20" l, 1.36 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 488 pages
Review
''The book is a wonderful combination of the scholarly and the personal, the academic and the meditative. The basic plan works beautifully, building a rich mix of his very, very careful and detailed reading of the text, his other wide reading, and his life in business; an extraordinary blend. I found the use of evolutionary biology and the Prisoner's Dilemma to explain the pragmatism of the Mahabharata absolutely brilliant.''
--Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago
''The book is a remarkable tour de force that connects an ageless philosophical epic to the travails of contemporary society. This book is for the liberal Hindu who does not want his religion co-opted, for the modern Indian who wants to build a fair and inclusive society and for the global citizen who is rendered asunder by moral absolutism. The dharmic challenges we face every day resonate throughout Gurcharan's book. Reading this book has been an enriching experience!''
--Nandan Nilekani, author of Imagining India
''Through a series of bravura readings of the Mahabharata, Gurcharan Das makes a learned and passionate attempt to inform how the great Indian epic might illuminate our present-day moral dilemmas. Readers will find his analyses of dharma insightful, challenging, and honest--doing full justice to the world's most complex, exciting and honest poem.
This admirable book offers precisely the kind of reflection that the epic itself invites--moral, political and public. It shows why the Mahabharata is a classic: because it is ever timely. This superb book is knowledgeable, passionate, and even courageous. Grounded in a secure knowledge of the narrative, it raises key moral problems--from the doctrine of just war to affirmative action to the nature of suffering--and it makes striking attempts to link these with contemporary discussions and issues, both public and personal.''
--Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Columbia University
''The book is a kind of miracle: a deeply sensitive man suddenly decides to leave his usual routines and familiar roles and to spend some years simply reading the Mahabharata and seeing what the ancient epic has to tell him; he engages profoundly with the text, with the bewildering profusion of its messages, its tormented heroes, and the dramatic events it describes; and he then finds the space and the right words for a thoughtful, highly personal, philosophically informed, skeptical, sustained response. Such things happen only rarely in our generation, and we should all be grateful to Gurcharan Das for this gift.''
--David Shulman, Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies, Hebrew University
''This book is a triple treat. It provides a subtle reading of episodes in the Mahabharata. It uses those readings to raise consistently provocative questions about the character of dharma. And it addresses important questions about the character of our ethical lives....It wears its learning lightly, prompting one to think, and hence it is a pleasure and a provocation.''
--Pratap Bhanu Mehta, political scientist and president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
''This wise, passionate, and illuminating book is one of the best things I've read about the contribution of great literature to ethical thought.''
--Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago
''Gurcharan Das' personal search for dharma in the ancient epic uncovers buried signposts to a desirable future polity. The Difficulty of Being Good is a significant Indian contribution to a new, universal Enlightenment that is not Western in origin or character. It is a delight to read a book that wears its learning so elegantly and presents its arguments with such panache.''
--Sudhir Kakar, author and psychoanalyst
''It took me on a huge intellectual and emotional journey. And with Gurcharan Das as guide, even familiar paths seemed to lead through fresh landscapes....The secular humanism and intellectual humility that shines through this beautiful book shows that--along with everything else--the Mahabharata can provide just what the modern world needs. Das' rehabilitation of Yudhishthira is inspiring...showing convincingly that [others] misunderstand his role. I came away feeling more whole.''
--Dr. Ian Proudfoot, Sanskrit scholar, Australian National University
"The Difficulty of Being Good represents an attempt by Das to bring together the two sides of his life, the literary and the practical. The result is a highly personal and idiosyncratic, yet richly insightful meditation on the application of ancient philosophy to
issues of modern moral conduct and right and wrong."--William Dalrymple, The Financial Times
About the Author
Gurcharan Das is the author of the much-acclaimed India Unbound, which has been translated into many languages and filmed by the BBC. He writes a regular column for six Indian newspapers, including the Times of India, and occasionally for Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. His other books include the novel A Fine Family; a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm; and an anthology, Three English Plays, consisting of Larins Sahib, 9 Jakhoo Hill, and Mira.
Most helpful customer reviews
44 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
A Reference for Life...
By Ravi S. Madapati
"The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living" -- Socrates
Doing a review of Mr. Das's extraordinary work "The Difficulty of being Good" is like trying to describe Sistine Chapel to a blind person. Yet, I am going to make a sincere effort in doing this because like Yudhistira says "I must". Since Indian philosophy unfortunately is fused with religion ("Hinduism" is not an organized religion around one book or one person), its hard for people to directly compare Mahabharata to Ancient Greek works of philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Its not taught in school since it has religiousness attached to it. Like Mr. Das himself says, if kids in Italy can read "The Divine Comedy", why cant kids in India learn Mahabharatha? Especially if doing so could make them better human beings? I would like to call Ramayana and Mahabharata, Indian tragedies, much like Greek Tragedies. Both end up causing tremendous agony to the reader by the way they end. But, ironically they both teach the reader about the value of life through tragedy. Both are attributed to two different authors but its likely that these works were authored over centuries with multiple redux versions. Much like the works of Aristophanes and Sophacles, these works are filled with deep human emotion, melodrama, fatalistic suffering and moral dilemmas. In both the epics, all the protagonists end their avatars after completing an odyssey that is filled with great suffering, longing, warring and separation from loved ones. Hence, I think they are much like the Greek tragedies. Now, tragedy is a strange emotion. when projected on external parties, it has the power to cleanse the audiences' emotional state of being and give them a sense of relief grown from utter despair. That's called catharsis. Different people find catharsis though different mediums, some through music, some through artwork and others through writings. I believe this magnum opus of Mr. Das, is his own catharsis.
By constantly craving to understand "dharma" and "dharmic religions", by constantly taking out examples from current day world and juxtaposing the same to Mahabharatha's world, he brings a perspective that is awe-inspiring, beautiful as well as pragmatic. By vicariously questioning the existential angst of the human condition and sometimes answering the same through these projections, Mr. Das tells a tale that is filled with anguish, suffering and pessimism yet somehow manages to create a light at the end of a turbulent and dark tunnel.
Mahabharata is carved into 18 books. It tells the story of an ancient Indian royal family. The crux of the book (or books) tells the story of warring cousins who both claim a right to their ancestor's kingdom. Who is the legal heir to the throne is actually not a matter of grey. Yudhistira, the eldest of all the cousins (105 in total), is first in line for the succession. But his cousin, Duryodhana, usurps the kingdom through a fraudulent game of dice and sends Yudhistira and his four younger brothers into exile. After returning from a fourteen year exile, Yudhistira requests his share of the kingdom, only to be denied even a single province. This leads to a great war between the two families, in which Yudhistira "wins". This is the basic plot of Mahabharata in a single paragraph. But the epic itself is seven times larger than Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Its the largest literary work ever written by mankind.
Mr. Gurcharan Das, educated in philosophy after which he became a senior manager at a world-class company before voluntarily retiring, authored "The Difficulty of being Good" with a deep passion as well as deep detachment. To his credit, he does not treat Krishna as the God while trying to understand the denouements of his actions. I believe this brings a sense of fairness into place. If you are aware of the stories within stories of this epic, you would agree that it becomes very easy to be deterministic if you choose the protagonist to be divine. We can just say, "hey, it was meant to me. this is God's will". But the ensuing suffering is human. So why would God want humans to suffer so as to make a point?
Being an Indian himself, the author knew the Mahabharatha inside out (of course he spent years studying the same under scholars at the University of Chicago), but he does not assume his reader to know the same. His erudition shines through across various chapters, in which he relates the dilemmas from the ancient epic to the problems of the modern world. He astutely tackles the complex episodes of this ancient prose with remarkable objectivity. He constantly compares and contrasts Mahabharatha's philosophy to that of the Western world. He writes freely and in an easy to understand compare/contrast format about the teachings of some of the greatest philosophers such as Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill and others. Breaking down his work into a few sections, he constantly exposes current issues by contrasting them to the issues in Mahabharatha.
Writing on Duryodhana's envy, which in the first place creates all the problems in the epic, he exposes the envy that caused the chasm in Reliance, the largest Indian company. He compares the silence of Bhishma to that of India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, while picking an able person as the next President of India. Had Draupadi been alive in this age, she would have questioned the corrupt Indian bureaucrats about their dharma in delivering basic services to the Indian masses. He questions his own glory-seeking trends when writing about Karna's constant status anxiety. He questions if George Bush Jr. felt the despair of Arjuna before going to war in Iraq. To me, these are astounding comparisons, which never crossed my own mind although they now seem so obvious now. This a mark of a man who is deeply moved by this epic and has keenly observed these characters in a detached way. These are some of the marks of Mr. Das's burning intellect.
By comparing Yudhistira's deep remorse after the war to that of Ashoka's, Mr. Das makes a point that maybe this was the work of a different author working during the Budhist times of 400BC. By drawing inferences from the works of Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sophocles and interspersing those ideas with that of Descartes, Locke, Rawls, Mill and others, Mr. Das creates a rich and complex moral web of life that will keep this book a living embodiment of what the elusive dharma is. If dharma is subtle as Bhishma says, how are we ever supposed to know what it is? If dharma is the right thing to do, who is to define what the right thing is? If Hitler's deplorable acts and heinous crimes were committed in the name of the right thing for him, is dharma personal (to him) or is it universal (for us and the allied forces)?
The author gives a superb introduction to the evolution of the word dharma, from Rg Vedic (1500 BC) times till the current day. That's the evolution of this elusive work over an approximate period of 3,500 years. That time-scale starting now in 2010 would end up in the year 5510. I wonder what dharma would come to mean then!
I have a lot of takeaways from this book. In a world like we are living in today, its not easy to be a good person. That is how capitalism/democracy has evolved in the last 100 or so years. Capitalism follows the Darwinian dictum that its only the tough who survive. So how could one be tough and good at the same time? Its difficult to be good when an honest man looks at the wealth a corrupt politician and thinks "look what being good gave me". That's what Draupadi asks Yudhistira in the forest, "why are we suffering while that evil Duryodhana is enjoying all the luxuries of the world?". I think what Yudhistira says here is a lesson for all us. He says, "I do this because I must". There is a certain Faustian tragedy attached to all our lives currently, because we just cannot understand the nobility of Yudhistira's words.
To be a corporate leaders, they say you have to be tough, make tough choices and kill competition at all costs and so on. Following this sutra, you can argue for and against companies like Microsoft for their conduct over the past decade. Haters can call this company a bully, innovation-killer and so on and so forth and followers can say that MSFT created a lot of shareholder wealth. But in the process was damage done to competitors and others? I am sure it must have, and I am also sure that Microsoft was following exactly what Milton Friedman said all those decades back, "a company's only job is to make money". Point being, if the world was Microsoft's Kurukshektra, it was waging a war, sometimes immoral (like the slaying the Bhisma if you will) and sometimes, moral. Again, its difficult being good and its also challenging to understand what dharma is. To follow a "swadharma" (personal dharma), and still go with these draconian times, seems more logical than following "sadharana dharma" (universal dharma). But, at the same time, its important to constantly know what the right thing to do is, whether its not polluting the environment or not doing immoral activities. Gulf of Mexico is immoral but its because we demand gas that drove BP to deep sea. Doing so, BP delivered shareholder returns pretty well in the past few decades but at what cost? A cost whose negatives are "externalized" and a tragedy whose pathos is "commonized".
As we flow like twigs in this water, trying to live a detached yet attached life, we are looking around for meaning to this journey. It was Socrates who said "The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living" and we are all in the throes of examining and defining some meaning to this bio-chemical reaction. The great point the book makes at the end is trying to give more meaning to this existential angst by telling that its compassion that is needed to lead a fulfilling life.
When Yudhistira steadfastly refuses to enter heaven if his dog is not allowed into it, that's when we realize that compassion for the world we live and compassion for fellow creatures is actually what makes us human. Yudhistira's observation from his strife-filled life is that dharma is compassion. Its not only about doing that elusive right thing, but also doing it with compassion. "The Difficult of being Good" is a stupendous work and personally it helped me in my quest to understand my own dharma as well as the dharma of these times. This is not a book to be read and recommended, its a book to be referenced for the rest of my life.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
"Dharma is subtle"
By Manoj
This is a wonderful read for anyone interested in a dissection of the Mahabharata and the questions it poses. Das evaluates every character and it's place in answering the search for the ubiquitous Dharma, and what it exactly entails, reaching to the only conclusion that the Mahabharata tries to teach, that it is subtle.
Das compares and contrasts the text with various other Western texts, the Greek ones especially, and conveys a certain authenticity to his ability as well-read enough to write on such a comprehensive and often contentious piece of literature. These comparisons are very interesting and shows the thought process of a researcher completely immersed and dedicated to the quest.
Opinion from elsewhere compares this book to Iravati Karwe's, Yuganta, an analysis of the Mahabharatha on similar lines. Das himself brings out Karwe's conclusions and compares his to hers. Very interesting in this light as well.
The USP of the book is supposed to be its ability in placing the erstwhile morals in the current context, and its evaluation of the directions in which we drift. Das achieves this well, especially when he utilizes his life as a driving force in finding the answers to questions he has pondered over. He is candid, which makes it easy for the reader to relate to the dilemmas. He places the very same questions in contexts like Nazi Germany, the Iraq war, India's struggle for independence, etc. and ponders over questions like the efficacy of a Just War, and the Hindu obsession with renunciation. These are definitely wonderful to analyze...
For me, the book stands out, not because it tries to bring current moral conflicts to fore, as the Mahabharata is a fairly modern text, constantly trying to breach the boundaries of traditional society, so the metaphysical problems back then are similar to the problems one faces in today's world. The book stands out because of it's humane analysis of these morals, an empathy towards the characters that ponder over these morals, the constant autobiographical thread that helps us relate to the writer and comparisons with western literature that have attempted to solve the very same questions...
Definitely worth the read !
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Ambitious work that mostly works. I would however have preferred crisper editing and a more cohesive narrative.
By Abhinav Agarwal
Ambitious work by Gurcharan Das. Conflicts experienced by the central characters are timeless - envy, revenge, deceit, sorrow... This very good book would have been an outstanding work with better editing, and without the constant references to Greek mythology.
This very ambitious work by Gurcharan Das seeks to bring the subtleties and ambiguities and conflicts in the Mahabharata and its characters into the modern world, and shed some light on what it takes to be good, and why that can be so difficult.
Why did Duryodhana suffer from envy? Don't we suffer from envy too? The author points to himself as an example. When a colleague gets promoted, we suffer immense pangs of envy.
Why did Karna suffer from status anxiety? Again, the author points to his own self and family with personal anecdotes to illustrate the point. To get that corner office, to be successful is equally important as being seen successful.
Why was Arjuna in a dilemma before the war? To do what is ones duty but that which is bound to cause you emotional pain. What about Bheeshma, or Yudhishtra? What about the terrible revenge extracted by Ashwatthama at the end of 18-day war? The emotions experienced by the characters in the Mahabharata are human emotions. What they experienced thousands of years ago are what we experience today.
This book works for the most part. However, crisper editing would have benefited the book. It feels a bit loose. The other crib is the author's insistence of trying to find parallels with Greek mythology.
It is evident, from a reading of the book as well as from the bibliography, that the author has done a commendable and copious amount of research into this great Indian epic. Between taking Sanskrit classes afresh, to reading dozens of translations of the Mahabharata, the Gita, the Greek opuses, and works on philosophy, the author is well armed to study and illuminate this epic anew with his insights. For the most part the book flows well and is quite a good read.
Different aspects of the epic and their bearing on a human's duty, dharma, actions, and so on are discussed in chapters named thus:
* Duryodhana's Envy - by far the most common emotion.
* Draupadi's Courage - in asking the elders of the Kuru gathering what dharma was. Was it right for a man who had lost himself to have then wagered his wife?
* Yudhishtra's Duty - in his steadfastness in accepting the wages of an unfair game of dice, thirteen years of exile.
* Arjuna's Despair - on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, faced with the now given situation where he has to fight and kill his relatives, his grand uncle, his guru, his cousins.
* Bhishma's Selflessness -
* Karna's Status Anxiety - on wanting to being accepted as a Kshatriya, a warrior.
* Krishna'a Guile - on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in securing for the Pandavas a victory. Whether dharma was followed or not, whether rules of war were observed or not (most certainly not).
* Ashwatthama'a Revenge - after Drona was killed as a consequence of a lie that Yudhishtra utters, Ashwatthama, Drona's son, wreaks a terrible revenge on the Panadavas.
* Yudhishtra's Remorse - at the end of the war, on seeing the victory as a hollow victory.
The author also shares in his own anxiety when he had to face when people around him got wind of his project, "... my plan to spend the next few years reading the Mahabharata..."
"I admitted reluctantly that I had been thinking of reading the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad perhaps, and ...
'Good Lord, man!', he exclaimed. 'You haven't turned saffron, have you?'
The remark upset me. Saffron, is, of course, the color of Hindu right-wing nationalism, and I wondered what sort of secularism it is that regards the reading of Sanskrit texts as a political act. I was disturbed that I had to fear the intolerance of my 'secular' friends as much as the bigotry of the Hindu Right..." [page xxxv]
At the end, this is a good book, but only one of several books I would want to read to better appreciate and understand the Mahabharata, the greatest of epics, the timeless source of unfathomable wisdom on duty, on life, and on dharma.
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