‘This book is sure to find followers among businessmen, corporate professionals and maybe even political leaders, all of whom seek to find a code of ethics that justifies their actions and who would be delighted to find an indigenous paradigm that allows for a contextual good rather than a categorical imperative… Here is a man in the shadowed afternoon of a life well-lived, now in a stage of quiet of self reflection when one looks back on what one has done and achieved and wonders about what lies ahead, what might happen next. For all of these reasons, Das is a thoughtful and compassionate guide through the territory that he defines and treads. He wields a confident machete that cuts through the tangles of ancient brush and the over-grown and self-congratulatory contemporary elephant grasses that cover the path towards clear-eyed ethical action… Das uses stories from the ancient text as parables to understand the world we live in and the people that we are surrounded by. The project he undertakes is as much about mining the past for wisdom as it is about parsing the present such that we can make sense of it. He uses the characters and the situations of the Mahabharata as a grammar through which we might tease meaning out of recent public scandals that ask the question, was this the right thing to do or, how could he have done this? …Das has the courage to seek a moral centre within the great text that is human rather than divine.’