Week 9: Mahabharata Notes - Karmic Revolution Part A

Image on Wikimedia

For this week’s version of the Mahabharata, I chose to watch the Karmic Revolution videos on YouTube. These videos are set up so that a learner can return to the channel every week and learn a little bit about the epic in three minutes. I think that these videos could have originally been longer or uploaded more frequently. They are accompanied by illustrations, which are a nice way to get a visual of the story.

Something that I really liked about this method of storytelling is that the video makers really want their audience to understand what is happening and try their best to make sure that their audience does not get lost. At the beginning of some episodes, they will recap all that the audience has already learned. In these recaps, they omit superfluous or detailed information and focus on the basics. This is very useful and helps the more important aspects of the epic stick in the learner’s mind.

An element of these videos that would make learning about the Mahabharata even easier would be to write out the names of the characters in the illustrations or to have them listed in the comments. There are some subtitles, but sometimes the spelling will be off on the names. It is nice to hear the characters’ names pronounced, but it can be hard to keep track of them since they are names unlike many of us are familiar with and they are difficult to spell.

Below, I have included a portion of the notes that I took while watching these videos:

• Karma - every action is both a cause of what happened before it and a cause of what followed
• King Shantanu fell in love with river goddess, Ganga. Ganga throws first seven children into river. Took last remaining son, Devavrat.
• Shantanu finds Devavrat sixteen years later and takes him back to city
• Shantanu falls in love again with young woman whose father will not allow her to marry the king because her sons would always be second to Devavrat. Devavrat notices how this affects his father...

You can access the YouTube videos here: link.