By chapter 3, the fall is complete and by chapter 4, the first murder has occurred. But weakness is followed repeatedly by forgiveness and by new beginnings. The work reinforces the importance of divine covenants found in Genesis, and has come to symbolize for those in the West divine intervention in human affairs and would be relied upon as the authority for movements of liberation into the twentieth century. The fascination of the games can be compared with violent and erotic content in the contemporary Roman houses and literature, and this raises questions about the function of violent representation in cultures everywhere. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are India's great epics, known the length and breadth of the subcontinent in countless variations.
Today there are comic books, cartoons, television movies.
The Mahabharata is immensely long - roughly fifteen times the length of the Bible. It is sometimes called the longest poem ever written. Its plot has many branches and digressions, but the main trunk is the story of a family battle, a struggle between brothers which ends up enlisting gods on one side or the other. Within this contest you have everything - philosophy, romance, religion, comedy. Confucius saw the state as the family writ large, while Legalists saw it as a machine for absolutism and the Taoists regarded it as an intrinsic evil.