I’ve been thinking about our two greatest epics.

Ramayana. Rama, we know who the Maryada Purushottam is. Ayana, travel or journey. With the Sandhi rule to take the soft a that Rama ends in, and the soft a that Ayana starts in, and compounds them to make ā. So roughly, The Journey Of Rama.

Mahabharata. Maha meaning great or mighty. Bharata, the name of the lands that would later be called Hindustan by the folks west of the Indus. Ending in a short a plus starting with bh means no vowel change. The definition is less additive, but it loosely translates to The Great Story Of Bharat.

Not 100% like how the uncles say it is, but there are some math-like rules that make Sanskrit more straightforward to read.

Back to the point. It’s interesting. One of them is the story about a family killing itself over some mere land because one blind king could not do his job. All being told by the grandfather who had to watch it all happen.

The other boils down to this. The crown prince gets cheated of his birthright by a greedy stepmother and gets sent to exile. Then has his wife kidnapped, and as a result battles and defeats the kingdom of someone who supposedly had ten heads.

It’s not that I don’t love our stories. But it’s weird just how jingoistic we get about exile and war. 

Ironically we love to talk about Ahimsa.