THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It’s not often that you get to hear a Communist leader delivering a discourse on the Mahabharata. CPI MLA and former minister Mullakkara Ratnakaran began his seven-day discourse on the great epic to a rapt audience at the Soorya Festival on Sunday evening.
Knowing the characters of the Mahabharata will help us know ourselves better, Ratnakaran said. His discourse on Sunday was on Satyavati, the Kuru matriarch. It was his first on seven important characters of the great epic that are planned over seven evenings.
The seed for the all-destructive Kurukshetra battle was sown by the greed of Satyavati and her father, Ratnakaran said.
‘’Through his tale, Vyasa speaks of a universal truth that the seed of all wars lie in all-encompassing greed. All that ensued in Mahabharata merely nurtured that greed,’’ Ratnakaran said.
‘’The story of avarice flows from a tiny spring into a rivulet and then a stream, finally transforming into a torrent,’’ he said.
Ratnakaran took the rapt audience through the great vow, the unfolding of the birth of the Kuru clan and the final decision of Satyavati to renounce everything and retire to the forest.