Reading Notes: Mahabharata Part B

  Reading Notes: Mahabharata Part A

Dhritarashtra just cannot hate his nephews

-Even though his son is demanding that his cousins be killed or exiled and essentially throws a fit, he cannot bring himself to wish them ill. If I rewrote this part I would make it more dramatic because I feel like he was kind of being a baby.

He gives them their own land

- The Pandavas make over this desert land to be the opposite of how it was given to them- a vibrant metropolis. I think that it would be fun to experiment with imagery and get really into the descriptions of the new country they founded.

Duryodhana becomes violently jealous

- Once again he throws a tantrum and devises an evil plan to steal away from his cousins their good fortune-he just can’t be happy for anyone else. I would also write this part with little to no sympathy for him, he was being honestly annoying.

Yudhishthira accepts an invitation to play dice with Duryodhana

Dice

- He goes and loses iconically, twice. These scenes were incredibly long and complicated and I ended up skimming then having to reread the pages several times. I would make this part way more concise. I thought that the scene where Draupadi was dragged around the court was well done but I don’t personally enjoy taking in media in which violence is committed against women so though reading it was not traumatic I personally will not be rewriting these scenes for a multitude of reasons, if I did I, as an author, would maybe include a trigger warning- not that Narayan’s version was particularly graphic.

He loses really bad, but is allowed to leave, then is forced back, then ends up condemning himself and his brothers into exile.

Notes taken over R.K. Narayan’s Mahabharata