Current storytelling yearns for happy endings. Traditional storytelling ends with sukhant. Sukhant is not happy ending, but a good ending, one in which the audience leaves the theatre wiser. Indian epics are not about telling how the good defeated the bad, how a hero succeeds on his quest, but about how life, and death, goes on uninterrupted, irrespective of the intervention of the gods. Eventually Ram and Krishna have to die. Eventually Dwarka has to fall. Eventually the Pandavas have to retire and renounce. And then new ideas come — germinating saplings that look at the same world again, anew, afresh, often repeating the same mistakes and grappling with the same issues as Kaikeyi and Kunti. The world changes, yet remains the same. Technology transforms but nature stays static.

I made a philosophical comment to my friend about how when nature shrugs, she does not care who she kills — Kauravas and Pandavas or Krishna or Ram. She is indifferent to human ethical dilemmas. Her intervention ends all conflicts. He then told me about the Aceh. Aceh? What was that?