Have you thought about why the Puranas are full of such a fascinating array of stories of gods, demons, men and life all around us? How the Puranas narrate all kinds of incredible happenings in a tsunami of emotions, ambitions, deeds of daring, conquests and dashed hopes? How rishis turn errant men and women into stones, ashes and worse? How a Bhagiratha struggles for eons to bring the divine river Ganga to earth? How heroes and heroines are born in strange circumstances to fulfill esoteric destinies!?
There is this expression - connecting the dots. As Steve Jobs says, one can develop a sense of fulfillment by connecting life's dots. Quoting his speech at Stanford:
"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
So Puranas help us to connect the dots. We encounter similar people and personality types in our everyday life, and we can imagine how these very people resemble the Puranic characters. But the Puranic narrative helps us to understand how these people will interact with one another and eventually with life at large. That gives us a unique sense of life and our own destiny.
Take the example of Ramayana. There is Rama, the powerful and rule-bound prince. There is Ravana, the powerful, rule-less and ruthless demon. Their story is made even more interesting by the sweet and helpless Sita, the scheming third wife Kaikeyi. The self-abnegating Bharata, the extraordinary Hanuman. The reckless Shurpanakha, the totally ineffectual Dasharatha. We may talk of curses. We may talk of twists of fate. We may talk of strokes of good luck and bad luck. But eventually the narrative simply connects the dots of possibilities and potentials with actualities, how life pans out. If we have the imagination, we will not take the story literally, but understand how it connects the dots!
If Puranas are so powerful, then we are lucky we had good story tellers in those rishis who narrated them. Imagine if they were like the TV Soap storytellers of today. These storywriters commit unpardonably bad acts of omission, commission, concocting coincidences and crazy occurrences, simply to prolong their employment contracts and the serials tenure= number of episodes.
There are some extremely ugly serials wherein a bad man becomes good, gets murdered, and another bad man as an imposter takes his place. They both look the same, act the same, but one is the duplicate. And hapless heroines get married to the wrong men all the time, thanks to the schemes of absolutely wicked other women.
Someone was seeing a popular serial. Seeing that a lovely young character simply missed the chance of telling others an essential piece of fact by a whole week, thereby prolonging everyone's misery, they screamed, "oh why doesn't Anandi tell it out just now... Why do it a whole week too late..!!!!" I said, "because the story writer was waiting for his bonus."
