New Delhi, March 24 -- I am not sure what I expected walking into a book discussion on the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, on a Sunday evening at the India International Centre in New Delhi, but I think somewhere at the back of my head I assumed it would feel distant from me, like most things do when they are treated as very important and very old. For a while it did feel that way; the panel was serious and the room was quiet and respectful and everyone spoke carefully. And then something shifted, and I started feeling this thing that I did not have a name for at the time, but which I think was actually just the tension between genuinely loving something and also being honest about it.

The book being discussed was From Death to Imm...