Quite a number of efforts have been made by various scholars to find the date of the Mahabharata War. Various methods have been used, using historical references in the Puranas, language conditions, archaeological findings etc. A few have used astronomical methods to determine the time of the Mahabharata. It is possible to determine the date of an astronomical reference by considering the movements of the planets including the Sun and the Moon in the various constellations of the sky, the movement of the Earth with its axis inclined to the ecliptic and the precession and nutation of this axis as well as the seasonal changes referred to in the text. Dr. P. V. Vartak from Pune carefully studied the astronomical references in the Mahabharata and corroborated the same with historical and archeological evidences. All in all, it is possible to state that the dates as derived by Dr. P.V. Vartak are more accurate than the various other dates propounded by other scholars who have been carried away by the statements made by Western scholars. They have been prejudiced against the richness of the Indian Civilization in the past and have always tried to attribute much later dates and consequently lo denigrate the glorious past of India. Dr. Vartak has derived the date of the initiation of the Mahabharata War to be 16th October 5562 B.C. This proposed date has been examined by a few scholars and has been verified. This may prove to be a break-through in deciding the chronology of the events in the history of India (and probably the World). Dr. Vartak has also derived the dates of Ramayana and the Vedas which has also been published as a book.
Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma Three Novels By R K Narayan
In the novels of R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), the forefather of modern Indian fiction, human-scale hopes and epiphanies express the promise of a nation as it awakens to its place in the world. The three novels brought together in this volume, all written after India's independence, are masterpieces of social comedy, rich in local color and abounding in affectionate humor and generosity of spirit.
Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi is the story of a businessman who adapts to the collapse of his weekly newspaper by shifting to screenplays, only to have the glamour of it all go to his head. In The Financial Expert, a man of many hopes but few resources spends his time under a banyan tree dispensing financial advice to those willing to pay for his knowledge. In Waiting for the Mahatma, a young drifter meets the most beautiful girl he has ever seen--an adherent of Mahatma Gandhi--and commits himself to Gandhi's Quit India campaign, a decision that will test the integrity of his ideals against the strength of his passions.
As charming as they are compassionate, these novels provide an indelible portrait of India in the twentieth century.
Graham Greene... "The novelist I most admire in the English language."
John Updike... "Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan's fictional city of Malgudi conveys."
The Spectator... "The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness...Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them."
New York Herald Tribune Book Review... "The experience of reading one of his novels is...comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness--like one's own reflection seen in green twilight."
The New Yorker... "Narayan is a writer of Gogol's stature, with the same gift for creating a provincial atmosphere in a time of change...One is convincingly involved in this alien world without ever being aware of the technical devicesNarayan so brilliantly employs."
