How Do I Tell These Stories?

He was born first. He was found by a charioteer and raised by his family on a riverbank. He is the greatest archer of his era. He is fighting for the wrong side. And his birth mother has known where he was the entire time. He is Karna. SOURCES CITED THIS EPISODE: • Bibek Debroy — The Mahabharata (10 vols.), Penguin Books India, 2010–2014 • Devdutt Pattanaik — Jaya • Ramesh Menon — The Mahabharata...

Three brothers engineered by Satyavati. One blind. One pale. One the wisest person in every room - and never allowed to be king. This is the story of a king who delivered everything the dynasty asked for and lost it all in one moment in a forest. And the wisest person in Hastinapur, who speaks truth his entire life and is never listened to. This is the story of Pandu & Vidur. This is the gener...

Three brothers engineered by Satyavati. One blind. One pale. One the wisest person in every room - and never allowed to be king. This is the story of the blind prince - Dhritarashtra and his family. His wife Gandhari who blindfolds herself on the day she marries. For life. Voluntarily. This is the generation that built the conditions of the Mahabharat that we know. SOURCES: Bibek Debroy: The Mahab...

Hastinapur. A tour of the city, the kingdoms radiating outward for hundreds of miles, and the eight kinds of beings who share this world. And at the center: one divine being in a human body, holding all of it together with nothing but a vow and a will. KEY CONCEPTS & PLACES Hastinapur : "City of Elephants." Capital of the Kuru kingdom, on the banks of the Ganga in what is now Uttar Pradesh. Ar...

She started as the girl nobody wanted. She ended as the woman who built a dynasty, saved it twice, and watched it burn anyway. Satyavati is the GOAT matriarch of the Mahabharata. Also a prince who loved his father so much he gave up marriage, children, and his entire future in one afternoon. Smart? It's your judgement. The cosmos had to invent a new word for what he did. That word was Bhishma.

N asks tough questions and Mom tries to answer them. Why do curses in these stories always land so hard and so fast? Who's running the cosmic score? And what does it mean that karma can apparently be modified, and edited. It evolves, but can never be escaped? We pick four characters, four scores, including a goat who gets a perfect 10.

Introducing Devavrat Bhishma. The eldest and most senior character of Mahabharat. The Pitamaha (Grandsire). A previous life, a karmic debt, and a river goddess with a broken heart to deliver. Shantanu's story starts before he's even born. It ends with a son who arrived carrying the heaviest cosmic score in the dynasty, and became its greatest legend.

He fact-checked the ring story. He wants to know if Yayati literally fell through the sky. And somewhere in the middle, I used the wrong acronym and invented a broadcasting network that doesn't exist. A bonus episode with an eleven-year-old who definitely doesn't listen to this podcast.

Chandravanshi King Yayati gets cursed with instant old age and asks his sons to take it for him. Four say no. One says yes without blinking. His descendants become the Kauravas, the Pandavas, and everything you've heard about the Mahabharata. The oldest son who said no and got cursed for it? His line gives us Krishna.

King Dushyanta proposes in a forest, leaves a ring as a promise, and forgets everything — thanks to a curse Shakuntala never heard about. She walks into his court, with their son and the truth, and the room laughs. Their son Bharat grows up to become a landmark figure in Indian mythology, giving India it’s name.

Urvashi had two conditions. Purarvas said yes before she finished. Pururvas and Urvashi — the most spectacular love story in the Lunar Dynasty, and probably the fastest anyone has ever lost everything over a goat.

A moon god elopes with a goddess. Heaven takes sides. And the baby born from the chaos makes a smart demand. Gods behaving badly, a cosmic war no one expected, and the origin story of the Mahabharata's most dramatic dynasty.

A dead snake prank curses King Parikshit. His son Janamejaya responds with a fire so large it pulls serpents from the sky. Then Astika walks up to the furious king and asks the one question nobody can answer. Oh, and this is just the prologue.