Review of book "The Bhagavad Gita for Millennials"

“The Bhagavad Gita for Millennials” plays the role of motivator and catalyst for new generation readers. It prepares a platform for the reader so that they can dive into the Ocean of “Srimad Bhagavad Gita”. Before making any dish, we familiarise ourselves with all the ingredients and recipes, then plunge into preparing the dish. This is how we can appreciate the taste of food. In a similar fashion, Bibek debroy, author, introduces concepts linked to Sanatan Darma and gives a boost to readers for further exploration.

 

This book consists of 10 chapters. It discusses Mahabharata, the beauty of the Sanskrit language, historical evidence supporting the Bhagavan Krishna as a human being who lived on the earth long back, then Bhagavad Gita, and many other related things that are needed for better understanding and internalize the philosophies of Gita. In this brief review, I am not going to discuss this book chapter by chapter.

 

The author dwells in time to give an idea of the creation cycle, Manu, Chaturyuga, Vedavyasa, characters who played significant role and timeline of writing/compilation of Mahabharata, the timeline of Kurukshetra war, Krishna's period, and so on. During the discussion of Sanskrit language and poetry, he makes the case that to understand Gita, we must read its Sanskrit version as no translation can accurately capture the meaning behind these texts. They can be very close to the text but cannot be 100% the same. He goes through Shruti and smriti and available written text to verify the existence of Lord Krishna as a historical figure and not as a mythical man. He also tried to explain the identity crisis, a person can face, by giving examples from stories, film dialogues, and proverbs. He further discusses Yoga, Meditation, Atman, and Paramatman. One crucial point to consider is that to understand our scripture, we must not be rigid as the same word/line/stanza can have changing meanings with time and context and depending on the person who is reading it. In short, this book is a must-read and introductory in nature for anyone to appreciate the beauty of our scriptures and to understand the ethos behind them.