If you ever thought, "It is impossible for a woman (Gandhari) to give birth to a 100 sons in a single lifetime, with or without the hand of God", then you've come to the right forum.

@sv. In that case I've come to the wrong forum :-)

@KeshavSrinivasan Yeah, only free thinkers here :)

@sv. Haha

@sv. In any case, Gandhari did not give birth to a hundred babies, she gave birth to a single lump of flesh, which was divided into a hundred pieces and then Vyasa magically turned those pieces into babies.

@sv. I hope you at least agree that it's possible to give birth to a lump of flesh. It happens to this day for ordinary scientific reasons.

@KeshavSrinivasan Yeah, that's the official story :P Now I wonder how did they show this on Star TV .. :)

"show this" meaning "show Vyasa magically turned those pieces into babies"

@sv. I don't know I haven't watched the Starplus Mahabharata, although lots of people in my family watched it and loved it.

@KeshavSrinivasan Yes, that's agreeable. Quite logical as it happens even today. Now I've read of a 20-yr or 30-yr pregnancy too where the mother didn't realize the pregnancy aborted on its own.

nydailynews.com/life-style/health/…

"40-year-old fetus found in 82-year-old woman"

@sv. Oh, I've never heard of that. In any case, Gandhari's pregnancy only lasted two years, so that's perfectly within the bounds of science. The only supernatural part is when Vyasa put those hundred pieces of flesh in pots, buried them and sprinkled water, and magically turned them into babies.

@sv. Wow, that's amazing.

@KeshavSrinivasan Yeah, what I suspect is .. over the course of time .. magically new verses or chapters appeared and replaced the original MB content. Now it's impossible to determine what the original MB really is.

@sv. Well, I certainly agree that the Mahabharata has interpolations in it. But it's a well-established principle of Mimamsa that by default we should accept a given scriptural verse as authentic unless we have a good reason to doubt that specific verse.

@KeshavSrinivasan Have you read or come across this book?

amazon.in/Yuganta-Iravati-Karwe/dp/8125014241/…

@sv. And having something supernatural happen is definitely not a good reason to reject a scriptural verse.

I'm currently reading this .. and it's one of the reasons I created this chatroom to discuss such things .. :P

@sv. I think I've heard of it. In any case, if you're interested in this sort of thing, you may want to read Bankim Chandra Chatterji's Krishna Charitram.

@KeshavSrinivasan Yeah heard of it, might read it next.

@sv. That also tries to strip the story of all mythological elements. In any case, I think all such endeavors are fundamentally flawed, because they assume there's a non-mythological core on which supernatural elements were added later on. But that's not the case, the supernatural elements are foundational to the story. That can be discerned from careful manuscript analysis.

@KeshavSrinivasan I don't think "supernatural elements were added later on" ... rather it was originally written with supernatural elements.

@KeshavSrinivasan I think treating Kings as born with an element of God is quite common in many other cultures.

@sv. Also, I suggest you look up Euhemerism. Euhemerists don't just seek to strip stories of human beings like the Mahabharata of supernatural elements, they try to rewrite stories of gods as originally stories of human beings who were deified. Amish Tripathi's books fall under that genre.

@sv. My story idea #2 here kind of turns Euhemerism on its head: medium.com/@lugita15/… Instead of the Euhemerist idea of stories of humans being turned into stories of gods, my story would be based on the premise that humans physically became gods, i.e. the very Sun which you see in the sky walked on the Earth just as you are walking now.

@KeshavSrinivasan Ok, yeah, Amish Tripathi tries to humanize all Gods ..