>The Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem and has been described as "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version consists of over 100,000 shloka or over 200,000 individual verse lines (each shloka is a couplet), and long prose passages. About 1.8 million words in total, the Mahabharata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, or about four times the length of the Ramayana.
honestly, that's just poor writing
shloka shloka
>>7567142
Has anyone on /lit/ actually read this?
Anyone alive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m49VSrX9vqU
oh. i havent read it, but this made it seem pretty good
>>7567184
I translated a few chapters for Sanskrit class in college, but never was hardcore enough to want to muddle through the entire cycles of epics.
Indian fag here. We are taught this in schools(parts of it). It turned me off completely. Always seemed like homework. Irrelevant, archaic and outdated philosophy. Never learned a good lesson from it. All the people who read it were really boring or they grew up to become pederasts masquerading as self-styled gurus that people in the west call Life Gurus.(JUST....)
Arjuna was inspiring when I was a 10 year old boy. Then his cuckoldry became apparent once i hit 15 and i never picked it up again.
TLDR: Stick with the Greeks. You aren't missing much.
>>7567439
>Stick with the Greeks
Do Indians read the Greeks?
>>7567353
It's about 1.5 times the length of In Search of Lost Time. You could finish it if you read it every day for a couple months.
>>7567439
Is Kalidasa at least all he's cracked up to be? (though I know he came like a thousand years later)
I suspect it's mostly about as boring as most of the Bible
>>7567184
I started but took a break a week or so ago to finish reading a book I'm borrowing. I had finally gotten to the rivalry of the Pandavas and the Kurus, and it took a lot of fucking set up and side-stories to get there.
Its verboseness is kind of endearing.
>>7567184
I watched the tv series when I was a kid. It was pretty good but each episode was like an hour long and there were 100 episodes.
You should read the Ramayan instead it's shorter but more focused and just as good. The only problem is finding a version that is both enjoyable to read and also true to the source. The Iskon version has the best prose, but the translator has obviously taken liberties and inserted a bunch of Iskon propaganda. Most notably at one point it inserts "and there were no atheists" when describing the city of Ayodhya which does not appear in any other translation or even the original text. I couldn't read past that knowing there'd be more bullshit like it.
>>7567184
I've read an abridged, novelized version (which was still huge), and parts of the original in English. It's an acquired taste, but the characters, philosophy, and plot resonated with me so intensely and personally that, after finishing it, I legitimately felt proud to be a human being.
>>7567656
Kill yourself. Remember, that he who thinks he can kill, and he who thinks he can be killed, are both mistaken.
>>7567704
That may be true, but my body certainly won't survive suicide. Go kill yourself, instead.
>>7567935
Your continued existence in this particular body brings shame to your name. Do thusly kill yourself with haste.
>>7567463
Poetry takes longer to read than prose
