The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art Of Dharma

Most of us spend our lives wrestling with day-to-day questions of right and wrong and these either unanswered or have no easy answer. This book turns to the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’ and it discovers that the epic’s world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings rather than the narrow and rigid positions that define most debate and discussion today after 9/11. 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 gets on with it; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and contradictory take on dharma. The epic’s characters are flawed; they stumble. But their incoherent experiences throw light on our day to day emotions of envy, revenge, remorse, status anxiety, compassion, courage, duty and other moral qualities. As the Mahabharata’s story unfolds in each chapter (and the author lets the epic speak as far as possible), the focus moves to a single character and his or her ethical problem–and its significance for our lives.