Quotes from Gurcharan Das

Dharma is easiest to spot by its absence: the Mahabharata employs the pedagogical technique of teaching about dharma via its opposite, adharma

Good intentions are useless in the absence of common sense. —JAMI, BAHARISTAN

When individuals blunder, it is unfortuante and their families go down. When rulers fail, it is a national tragedy

One should never do to another what one regards as injurious to oneself. This, in brief, is the law of dharma. —Mahabharata XVIII.113.8

When ordinary human beings err, it is sad, but when leaders do, it haunts us for generations.

a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not so good. Hence it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge . . . according to necessity.'25

What sort of ideas, I wondered, might help to give meaning to life when one is in the midst of fundamentalist persons of all kinds who believe that they have a monopoly on truth and some are even willing to kill to prove that?

Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.

So when Yudhishthira tells Draupadi that eventually human acts do bear fruit, even though the fruit is invisible,56 one might interpret 'fruit' to mean the building of character through repeated actions. Yudhishthira was certainly aware that repeated actions had a way of changing one's inclinations to act in a certain way. That inclination is character.

Despite the many occasions when its characters feel frustrated before the weight of circumstances, and despite blaming their feeling of impotence on daiva, 'fate', moral autonomy shines through in the epic. Because they have some freedom to choose they can be praised when they follow dharma or blamed when they follow adharma. At the moment of making a decision they become conscious of their freedom, and it is this perception of autonomy that gives them the ability to lead authentic moral lives.

Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.

The human tendency to evaluate one's well-being by comparing it with that of another is the cause of Duryodhana's distress.

Sleeping in the park in a city is a form of civilization. First, you need a city with enough bustle and clatter to make a person yearn for a calm, green spot. Then you need a first-class park,

Modern India is a product of Hindu tradition, the religion of Islam, and Western civilization.

Customs inspectors could not stop the export of software through telephone lines; labour inspectors could not stop software engineers from talking to customers in America at night; excise inspectors could not harass the IT firms because the government did not levy tax on services. Much like Gurgaon, India's knowledge economy literally grew at night when the government slept.

ahimsa paramo dharma', 'non-violence is the highest dharma'.59

By deceiving Drona, Yudhishthira corrupts his teacher's relationship with the world. So do we every time we lie - we corrupt the 'other' in the same way.

Yudhishthira taught me that moral integrity begins with the awareness of other human beings. The reality of others looms large in Yudhishthira's consciousness—it is the shining feature of his personality,

Yudhishthira answers Yaksha's question - what is man? by saying, 'The repute of a good deed touches heaven and earth; one is called a man as long as his repute lasts.

The concept of dharma evolved over time, its meaning shifting from a 'ritual ethics of deeds' to a more personal virtue based on one's conscience.

Be intent on the action, not on the fruits of action.2

I have learned that the Mahabharata is about the way we deceive ourselves, how we are false to others, how we oppress fellow human beings, and how deeply unjust we are in our day-to-day lives. But is this moral blindness an intractable human condition, or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state also treats us, and can we redesign our institutions to have a more sympathetic government?

Commerce they say, encourages the bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work,self -reliance,and self discipline.

Prashna is 'question' in Sanskrit, but it can also mean riddle or puzzle. It points to a 'baffling, ultimately insoluble crystallization of conflict articulated along opposing lines of interpretation'.