At the launch of Gurcharan Das’s latest book based on readings of the Mahabharata in Mumbai, that Seer of Software, Jaithirth `Jerry’ Rao, alluded to a widely held belief about the epic in India. Unlike the Ramayana, which is believed to bring happy augury to any home, the Mahabharata is frowned upon as a book that invariably brings strife and distress.

On the face of it, it's an absurd proposition: that the study of a lengthy Sanskrit text written thousands of years ago can shed light on the workings of today's competitive, capitalist economy. Yet that's exactly what Gurcharan Das sets out to do in his latest book, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma. In it, the former chief executive of Procter & Gamble India and managing director of Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning) brings the ideas and moralities of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, into contemporary life.

The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan are meeting today in New York to carry forward the peace dialogue begun at Sharm-el-Sheikh. India’s decision to meet has been prompted by Pakistan’s arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks. Many Indians feel cynical, however, about today’s meeting, especially after the disappointment at Sharm-el-Sheikh. Negotiating with a nation whose secret service might be plotting the next terrorist attack on you seems bizarre, but is there an alternative to the slow, maddening grind towards peace with our neighbour?

Anyone travelling in India by air must have got a sinking feeling last week when the Congress leader, Sanjay Nirupam, demanded that Jet Airways be nationalized. He raised the spectre of the ugly days when Indian Airlines had a monopoly of the skies before 1991. This would have effectively turned Jet Airlines from one of the world’s best airlines to one of the worst. Naresh Goyal, Jet’s founder, on the other hand, was scared of his pilots forming a union because of his memory of the 1974 Air India pilots’ strike which started the decline and fall of Air India.

If US President Barack Obama had listened to Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas in Mahabharata, he would not have behaved the way he did when he had to deal with the greed and indiscretion of America’s top investment bankers.

As a result of meticulous research, an eye for detail and probably the time he spent in Harvard as a student of philosophy, the book offers not just an Indic perspective on dharma, but also an indepth comparison of Mahabharata heroes with their Greek counterparts.

As in the case of Gurcharan Das, it was my grandmother who introduced me to the Mahabharata in my childhood. Das returned to the epic later on in life and as his lucidly written book The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma shows, the author has used it as a base to understand the present, including the nature of capitalism.