Even as India grapples with the difficult public policy choices forced on us by the covid-19 pandemic, state-run Doordarshan has been telecasting two classics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
While some critics have seen Hindu revivalist motives in these telecasts, the underlying themes and situations in these classics relate not to religion, but the ethical dilemmas they bring to the fore.
Many of the moral and ethical dilemmas presented in these epics relate to the difficult tradeoffs individual characters have had to make between personal principle and public good, between ego-centrism and acceptance of the unimportance of individual preferences in the context of potential calamity.