Why does a story of family feud, war and right action dating back to 8th century B.C. bring together a writer in Delhi, a Media Professor in England and a Nuclear Medicine expert from Manchester?

Kurukshetra may have been a nuclear battle

Who: Dr Manish Gupta, consultant and honorary senior clinical lecturer in nuclear medicine
Medium: Film

"There are 150 astronomical references in Mahabharata. If it were a mere exaggerated account of a family feud, as some claim, why would there be so many astronomical references?" asks Dr Manish Pandit. In Mumbai to screen his documentary Krishna: History or Myth, the UK-based specialist in nuclear medicine thinks it's time we stopped categorising Indian scriptures as "mythology".



"Fantasies and miracles in knowledge don't make sense to me. Mahabharata is a fantastic epic, one which would have required more than just imagination to write. There is astronomical evidence that the Mahabharata war started on November 22, 3067 BC. So rare was the set of astronomical juxtapositions that it occurred only once in the last 10,000 years! The philosophy of Bhagwad Gita is hitherto unparalleled in the spiritual realm. No saint, prophet, master or mystic has covered so many topologies with so much mastery. It gives exact descriptions of things that happen today and could happen tomorrow," says Dr Pandit, who hails from Pune.

For instance, the theory that Mahabharata was a nuclear war. "Some weapons in the battle defy contemporary knowledge of weaponry that people of that time could have conceived. It is not surprising that the father of the atomic bomb, nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer, jumped after seeing the atomic blast and cited a similar verse from the Gita. The man had learned Sanskrit specifically to read the Gita in its original form."u00a0

Those were also years of major climatic shift on earth. The Sahara region changed from a habitable land to a barren desert, glaciers expanded to cover plants, atmospheric temperatures fell drastically. This was also the time the Harappan Civilization is supposed to have begun. "It may not be entirely unlikely, that these climatic shifts may have mimicked a nuclear winter," says Dr Pandit who had written books in Jyotisha and is considered an expert in Indian history and mysticism.

Yet, the epic does not propagate violence, according to the producer. "In fact, its beauty is that you don't need to study anything other than Mahabharata to understand human nature. Every circumstance shapes the destiny of every character, each giving a lesson for the world to learn," says the man who doesn't consider himself Hindu, Christian or Muslim. "You could say I believe in sanatan (eternal) dharma."

Shot in eight Indian cities, Cambodia, US and UK, Krishna: History or Myth relies on astronomical, archaeological, living and oral tradition to prove that "Krishna existed in reality, not merely in the scriptures".

What if Vyasa spoke to Wall Street bankers?

Who: Gurcharan Das, author
Medium: Book