The Difficulty of Being Good

Most of us spend our lives wrestling with day-to-day questions of right and wrong that are either unanswered or have no easy answers. The Difficulty of Being Good turns to the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, in order to answer the question, why be good? and it discovers that the epics world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings rather than the narrow and rigid positions that define most debate in this fundamentalist age of moral certainty.

The Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma–in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he gets on with it; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. The epics characters are flawed; they stumble. But their incoherent experiences throw light on our familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. As the Mahabharatas story unfolds in The Difficulty of Being Good, the focus shifts from character to character–Bhishma, Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Draupadi, Duryodhana, Karna, Aswatthama, and Krishna–their ethical problems, and the significance of these issues for our lives.

Gurcharan Dass best-selling book India Unbound examined the classical aim of artha, material well being. This, his first book in seven years, dwells on the goal of dharma, moral well being. It addresses the central problem of how to live our lives in an examined way–holding a mirror up to us and forcing us to confront the many ways in which we deceive ourselves and others. What emerges is a doctrine of dharma that we can apply to our business decisions, political strategies, and interpersonal relationships–in effect, to life itself.