One way to read the epic — an old and widely held way — is as a psychological map. Kurukshetra becomes any moment in which what is easy and what is right diverge.
This allegorical reading is one interpretation among several; the Mahabharata is also a narrative, a political text and a legal treatise, and nothing here is meant to displace those readings. But the interior reading has real diagnostic power, and it is the one this book uses. On it, the figures of the epic are not people to admire or condemn but tendencies to recognise in oneself.
What pulls downward
Duryodhana
The part of us that cannot accept correction. Entitlement defended as principle.