Dear Readers...

Dear Readers:

Writing long form is much different from banging out a short piece. It seems to be a completely non-linear process. As much as I try to proceed along organised lines, the work zigs and zags and takes on a life of its own. I never intended to spend so much time on the story of Nala and Damayanti, but I realised this is a kind of light reading that many people enjoy. As I began, I found myself drawn into the world of the Mahābharata: the Indian subcontinent near the Himalayas and the valley of the ancient Saraswati River thousands of years ago. I like to inhabit that world, since our own world is so upside down. As of now, I intend to write a concise explanation of "Subjective Evolution of Consciousness," as well as to continue my writing on the Mahābhārata.

Another reason why I chose this story for a long-form piece is that I'm struggling to find the right tone for a modern retelling of the Mahābhārata. I find the classical style of the original Victorian Sanskrit scholars echo through my own prose, but I'm struggling trying to find a bit more modern tone.  Constance Garnett, who translated the Russian Giants of literature, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, made Chekhov speak Victorian English, but that was hardly Chekhov's style.  Vyāsa's Sanskrit is terse, meaningful, and highly descriptive. It's hard do give him justice, but he's hardly Victorian.

Translations by both the Victorian Sanskritists and even modern Indian authors tend towards florid prose in my opinion. They lack the terse, pointed expressions used in Sanskrit by Vyasa himself. The end result is something like fairy tales.

I grew up reading Arthurian legends, Shakespeare's tragedies. and Cervantes, before graduating to the Bhagavad-Gita. It's curious that Cervantes begins his Quixote by parodying the style of chivalric fantasies and ends by creating a new chivalric hero told in the style of Magical Realism.

My attempts to retell these stories, while sadly lacking in finesse, aim at bringing a certain amount of Realism to what seems Magical. I hope I have not failed the reader entirely. But in any case, I took on Nala and Damayanti with a view to bringing more realism to bear and working on the prose style I will need to attempt the greater task of telling the inner story of Mahābhārata. Nala and Damayanti have a clear beginning, middle,  where the Mahābhārata ambles on, moving back and forth through time and the karmic back-stories of its heroes. It's a daunting task, so I thought I would work on something simpler first. So my linear organization of Mahābharata led me to this charming episode.

Now that I have made some progress on my rough draft of Nala and Damayanti, I'm setting it aside for a while. Ovid, the famous Greek poet, advised that after writing a poem one should hide it away for 12 years before taking another look at it for editing. At the present moment, I lack an editor, so I must leave this story aside for awhile. If luck permits, I will take it up again in future and edit it. It's strange to me to publish my first drafts on the internet like this, but I'm getting some positive feedback that keeps me inspired to continue writing. Thanks to all the readers and may the story do you some good and free you from the spell of Kali, just as it gave courage to Yudhisthira Maharaja, exiled in the Kamyaka forest, so long ago.

Mahayogi.