Completing Vyasa's Mahabharata 67 Upakathakas for the Modern Reader

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Who has the time to read the entire Mahabharata? 100,000 Who shlokas by some accounts, roughly 80,000 shlokas with the Critical Edition of BORI (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute). With say 20 words per shloka, that's 2 million words for the former and 1.6 million words for the latter. In this day and age, when time is at a premium and social media presence beckons, few lack the patience and perseverance. In an earlier era, these stories were heard from grandparents, passed down verbally. With the inevitable breakdown in the joint family system, a generation of grandchildren missed hearing these stories from their grandparents and those grandchildren have now become grandparents. Who doesn't know about the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana? Most have a passing degree of familiarity with both, or think they do.

In the corpus of texts on Hinduism, 'shruti' texts are the most In the corpus of tests on Hinduism, shutterst texts are considered divine in origin and authorless. The Vedas are shruti texts. Then come 'smriti' texts. Smriti means 'that which is remembered' and were composed by authors. This is the reason Vyaasa is known as the compiler of the Vedas but the author of the Mahabharata. Among smriti literature, you have Puranas, Itihaasa, and other texts. Itihaasa, which means 'that is indeed as it was', can also be translated as history, and includes only two texts- Ramayana and Mahabharata.