Description

About The Book

“I had no choice.” “It was my duty.” “It was for the best.”
We have all said these words. And somewhere inside, a quieter voice has asked: was that true?

The Mahabharat is the story of a war. The Mahabharat Within is about the war that came first: the one inside Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Karna, Draupadi, Gandhari, Kunti and fifteen others, between what they told the world and what their hearts knew.

Each of the twenty-one chapters opens with a verse from the Bhagavad Gita and takes you into one person’s inner world. Then the story steps into today, where the same struggle shows up in ordinary lives: at work, in families, in friendships, and in the quiet of our own minds. Every chapter closes with three reflections, one question, a moment of peace, and a blank page for your own words.

This is not a retelling of the epic, and you do not need to know it. It is a book for anyone who has kept a secret, stayed silent, played a part, or carried a role for too long. It invites you to own your truth, know it, be it, become it and live it, with kindness towards yourself and towards others.

The war is not outside. It never was.

About The Author

Vandana Mehrotra finished her engineering at a private college and then struggled to find a job that matched her potential. Ankur Mehrotra, a post-graduate from IIT Delhi, went to Motorola, where he filed four patents. Together they turned two very different starts into a long run of building: seven businesses since 2006, in IT consulting, education, luxury retail and franchising.

They also had a list of dreams. The dreams were small, so they ticked them off, one by one.

Then the quiet came. For Vandana, it brought an old question: Why am I here? She had been in conversation with herself all her life, a question inside, an answer inside, and a conflict between the two. She saw the same gap in the people around her, the distance between who we are for others and who we are for ourselves. In an assessment of the eight intelligences, her inner and outer scores matched, which the counsellor called very rare. That may be why she felt the gap so sharply in everyone else. The first part of her search is told in Awaken Your Divinity Within.

While working in AI filmmaking with Short Sparks, a thought came to her after a live session: how do you show what happens inside us? The answer was already there. The people of the Mahabharat are known to everyone, and their conflicts are the ones we all carry.

Vandana wrote the conflicts. Ankur, a software architect and a widely read student of the epic, checked every fact and added what building, failing and beginning again had taught him.

They live in Bangalore. Inner Awakenings Through Mahabharat is their fifth book, after You Can Do It, Everyday Wisdom, Awaken Your Divinity Within and Antaraal.