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Since I moved to America. I have faced many questions about my country (India) and my culture. I want to utilize this podcast to familiarize my culture to western world. Mahabharata is a story written by Veda Vyasa. The same person who originally deciphered Vedas and spearheaded the preservation of these ancient texts. Mahabharata is supposed to be his attempt to bring the knowledge of Vedas to common man, in the form of a narrative story. It is said, there is nothing that is not included within Mahabharata and there is nothing that is left out. I will just tell you the story. You be the Jude.
Hey guys, it's me Vishnu Vaka.
Today, I am, well, I'm going to start, this is my new podcast. Welcome to my podcast. It's called Mahabharata narrated by Vishnu Vaka. Who am I? I'm a standup comedian.
I moved here when I was 15 to America from India. I bred a lot while I was in India. So I understood my culture where I know the stories. And then when I moved here, I realized there is a lot of misinformation about my people and my culture in this country. And it bothered me back then. I was like, how many people am I going to tell? You know,
what am I going to do? Like how many people am I going to educate? How? But now thanks to podcast and, you know, I could literally bring my culture close to you and I figured the best way I could do is by telling you this fantastic story called Mahabharata. It is called a Ithyasa story of the land.
Mahabharata is story of my land. Bharata. Bha in Bharata stands for Bhavam, which means emotion.
Ra in Bharata, the second syllable. Ra stands for Raga or melody. And the third, Tha stands for Thandava or dance. A country where Bhavam, Ragham and Thandavam
Welcome to Bollywood.
Anyways,
I'm hoping this would kind of give you an idea of what my culture and what my people are like. And, you know, bring us all a bit closer. I think that is very important in a multicultural society as ours.
I mean, if you know people's cultures, there is a less chance of hatred. I think it makes it easy. If we don't know each other, it makes it easy for whoever the people that want to take advantage of us to misinform people and teach hatred.
But if we are educated about each other, we know where we are coming from. So there is a less chance of misinformation. So my hope by narrating this wonderful story to you, I hope to give you an insight into my culture and I'm hoping this would kind of, you
let's start with the story Mahabharata. It is written by a person named Veda Vyasa. Veda Vyasa is actually his title because he deciphered Vedas. But his real name is Krishnath Vyapayana. Krishna means dark, the color of water filled clouds. And Vyapayana means a person,
a dweller of an island. So he grew up in an island and he is known as Krishnath Vyapayana because he's dark. That is what people call him and that is how he is known as. And later on, he took Vedas. We don't know the origin of Vedas, but it is believed by Hindus that are there left here to us as instruction manuals to survive in this world. So Krishnath Vyapayana took these Vedas and deciphered them into four parts called Rig Veda, Ejur Veda, Sama Veda, Adarva Veda. After doing that, he wrote this book called Mahabharata, which is actually a story of his descendants.
But in that he incorporated the essence of Vedas.
So it is more palatable to regular people who can still utilize the gist of Vedas without having to go through them.
And as I said, Mahabharata is a really long story. I mean, if you think about Homer's earlier, this is 13 times bigger than that. And luckily this survived because a lot of Indian literature is lost. 80% of literature is destroyed by the invaders.
Only they say like only 20% survived. Out of that, there are only a couple of versions of Mahabharata that survived. One of them is a Telugu version, which was translated from an earlier Sanskrit version between 11th to 14th centuries. By the Kavitrayam are the three poets.
Kavi means three poet. Trayam means, sorry, Kavi means poet. Trayam means three. Nanaya, Thikna and Era Pravada.
For short, Erona. These are the three guys.
Nanaya started it. He is the poet in the court of King Rajaraja Narendra.
In 11th century, Rajaraja Narendra asked him to translate Mahabharata into Telugu because the earlier copies were gone. And Nanaya took on the task in 11th century. He finished it. He finished two and a half chapters before he passed away. And then for about a century, nobody touched it. A century later, another poet named Thikna took up the task in 13th century. He started, but he didn't touch the half part. He started at the third chapter and finished the rest of the story. And the half that was left over hanging, that was finished by Era Pravada or Erona later on in the early 14th century. And I refer to this book mostly because I wanted to get to the source as much as possible and I can read Telugu and I trusted those poets and the modern writers.
So that's where I went to. So most of it I'm sourcing from there.