An old epic in a modern form

The Mahabharata has been translated into English several times but with the size of the translations (8-11 volumes each), few laymen ever read the whole thing. There have been accessible and short retellings of the story but these suffer from one crucial drawback. The Mahabharata to most Indians who have heard it narrated to them is not a single story but a whole bunch of stories, each of which is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. We hear the stories at different times, and being familiar with the skeleton of the epic, fit the pieces as we see fit.

That sort of telling is not possible with a book. With a book, you have to maintain a linear narrative, where one thing leads to another. You can choose either to digress or to tell the original story. You can not do both. Thus, people who tell the Mahabharata story make compromises. R.K. Narayan tells the bare-bones skeletal story but omits the myths and aura of the epic. Rajaji tells the pious story but dodges the unpleasantness. William Buck keeps almost everything and loses the story.

There was no way around the peculiar problem, until the popularity of hyperlinked text. I can maintain the linear narrative of the story, and spray the text with digressions into mythology. And you, the reader, can read the story as you please.