Hey Madhusudan.....

Off late, I have gotten into this habit of watching episodes of Mahabharata (an hindu epic). When I was back in school, this epic was made into a series and was being shown on national television in India. It was one of the most watched TV series in India back then. The King County Libraries have DVDs of this series that I borrow and watch.

This series in my opinion was far ahead of its times. The screenplay, script and dialog delivery was excellent. The sets during the war were fantastic too. Most of the actors are quite impressive. Mukesh Khanna (as Bheeshma), Gufi Paintal (as Shakuni), Pankaj Dheer (as Karna) and of course Nitish Bharadwaj (as Krishna) stand out for their acting and they suit their roles very well. Kudos to B. R. Chopra and Ravi Chopra for their excellent direction. The script writers have very clearly made an effort to limit the words used in the series to Sanskrit derived Hindi words.

I was recently looking for the DVD collection of this series. The price seems to be around 150-180$ for the entire set (16 DVDs). I have added this to my wish list now.

There were many other mythological TV series like Krishna, Vishnupuran, Jai Hanuman... and none of them seem to have worked out well. Were they badly directed? Or was it that the advent of cable television opened up viewer options and caused the distribution in the viewership numbers? I guess the answer is both. Ramayan (by Ramanand Sagar) was one of the earliest attempts of making a series out of an epic and it did have quite good viewership numbers because people didn't have cable television to split the viewership. In my opinion, the direction and popularity of Ramayan was not good enough and it would have been slotted among the less popular epic series if it was screened in the post cable era. The demand for the Mahabharat DVDs (which is more than the Ramayan ones) in libraries suggests that Mahabharat was really well directed.

Here is a link to the B. R. Films site that gives details about this series.

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