Tár: A Detail

 

It seems funny to me that many people, including some esteemed and highly experienced critics, consider Todd Field's intention for the movie to be a stand against the "cancel culture," a term now used almost exclusively by the right wing in the political and cultural power struggle to clobber the annoying rise of nontraditional factions in society. I suppose certain choices made by Field could cause this conception, although I do believe it is a misconception. 

This is a meticulously plotted movie with barely visible threads woven into a tapestry that often obscures the intention through mumbled dialogues, half-finished sentences, glimpses of email text, and scenes that cut away from accusations and depositions. Perhaps he is too clever for his own good, and it serves him right to be misunderstood. 

I am fairly certain I can tell where Field's sympathy lies. There are many little clues throughout the movie that consistently support my interpretation. But I will bring up just one detail that I have not seen anyone mention (not that I've read every review online) ---

This movie made the extraordinary choice of putting the film's supporting crew on the opening credits, while leaving the actors to the end credits. The list of names of gofers and assistants and hair and makeup people and stunt actors and drivers and accountants and marketing people went on for several minutes before the movie started, which is a prime location that is almost always reserved for only the stars and the important people: cinematographer, music, screenwriter, and director. I have NEVER seen any movie putting the support people first.  

In the background of the extraordinary opening credits, a song was played, and all the while I wondered what language it was. Spanish? French? No. It only became clear in the opening Q and A between Lydia Tar and Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker that this was the music of the indigenous people of Peru, which served as one of many stepping stones, or body ladders, that built her glowing career. 

Well, that seems to have gone over people's heads, who have probably also missed the face of an indigenous man in Lydia's dream, shown after the other more familiar faces of people who had been USED by Lydia.

Still don't get it? Consider the denouement of the movie, when Lydia is told by the Filipino boy in the boat that the reason why there are crocodiles so far up the river is the Americans. Many years ago, the film crew for that Marlon Brando movie (obviously referring to Apocalypse Now) put the crocodiles in the river, and now they can't swim in the water. Thanks a lot, you Imperialist shits. 

Yes, it's all intentional. None of it is an accident.

Everyone and his mother is throwing around the word "power" without any follow-up discussion in regards to this movie, as if they could actually recognize it when its manifestations hit them between the eyes. No, the movie is about exploitation, even if it is very coy about it. I wonder if Todd Field thinks it's funny to fool people into thinking he supports right-wing conservatives on the matter of poor canceled celebrities who have exploited many. Is this a joke to him?

Citta: The Brain (Yoga Sutras Notes #1)

 

In this book, Bryant translated and collected major commentaries and explanations of the famously brief and sometimes cryptic sutras by Patanjali. I especially find his approach of mixing certain Sanskrit keywords in the text to be instructive. In these instances, the non-interchangeability between Sanskrit concepts and their (supposedly) corresponding English words is palpable. Despite sharing the Indo-European roots, the non-translatability is probably due to the massive distance in time. 

It is hard to overstate the vast theoretical context behind the brevity of this manual. I am crawling my way through it slowly, and every few pages I am surprised by the deep insight into human psychology that was gleamed by the ancient Indian scholars and practitioners. I am in awe of these insights, not necessarily as a source of mysticism or exotic wisdom, but rather by the exhaustive and sophisticated examination of ... neurological patterns of the human mind. 

Take for example the concept of citta, which refers to an organ that provides three types of functions: buddhi (roughly translated as intelligence), ahankara (the sense of self, I-ness, ego), and manas (the part of the mind that performs thinking and sensory processing). 

Looking at these three components, one cannot help but be struck by their accuracy in describing some of the major activities of the brain. In the most basic aspect, it is now well established that one of the major functions of the brain is to centrally process and interpret the excitatory signals transmitted from the peripheral nerves (ie, manas), which allows humans to perceive and react to the environment. This neurological discovery in modern medical science was fairly recent and based on the anatomical exploration and understanding of the nervous system. The definition of buddhi, which emphasizes discernment and judgment, largely matches what is referred to as the executive function in neuroscience, which is carried out by the prefrontal cortex. 

Of course, I am by no means saying the ancient Indian theory of the brain is complete or comparable to modern neuroscience. Several other types of brain functions that we now know are not described in this theoretical system, such as the emotional and instinctive activities in the limbic system and the structure and activities related to learning and memory (the hippocampus and more). Their technologies and research framework did not allow the ancients to realize that major bodily functions, such as body temperature, breathing, and heart rate, are linked to the brain stem. Nevertheless, I am greatly impressed by how far they had gone using only direct and empirical observations of the mind. The power of their self observation is astounding and unparalleled. (Perhaps this is in some ways related to the pursuit of "detachment", but that's a topic for another day.) 

The examination of the sense of self is particularly fascinating and sophisticated. Recently I am intermittently reading a book by the German psychiatrist Fritz Simon, in which he explains how every concept is defined by what is inside versus outside a border (ie, what it is versus what it is not). It is a difficult and abstract concept that I have a hard time grasping and have never seen described in basic psychological theories. Yet the ancient Indians realized that the human mind (or what is now widely referred to as "consciousness", a fashionable and self-aggrandizing buzzword since the 2000s) is self-referential. 

Another eerily accurate insight is that the brain's existence is proven through its constant activities, defined as vrttis. The ancient Indians asserted that our endless thoughts, feelings, reactions, dreams, and spontaneous, internally generated sensations, are the manifestations of a physical organ that is alive and working. This insight alone outstrips Descartes by hundreds or a thousand years. The Indian philosophers explained it in an elegant analogy: Citta is the sea, and vrttis is the waves.

Fiction

In the year of 3001, Captain Gerald Clement set up an outpost in the Omega quadrant to monitor the only planet E118208 in the system RTM1921-14, where complex life forms had recently been discovered. The unmanned small space station faithfully orbited E118208, and the robots were able to recorded photos and data on the surface for many millennia. 

When the space station started its monitoring activities, there were at least two species that appeared to be sentient co-existing on the surface of E118208, which were named Nooton and Qadyl. They were approximately the same in body size and level of intelligence. Nootons looked somewhat like octopuses, and Qadyls looked like a little like lobsters. The number of each species on the planet was roughly equal. 

Naturally, it was surprising to humans that two intelligent species could co-exist in peace, unlike Homo sapiens and other hominids. Soon it became clear that these two species were highly dependent on each other for survival. Specifically, Nootons required a nutrient secreted by a fungus living inside the brain of Qadyls, which flows out of Qadyls' shell in the "neck" area, while Qadyls could not complete a reproductive cycle without eating one of a Nooton's eight tentacles. 

The consumption did not kill the organism, unless someone suddenly became gripped with greedy madness and bit off a Qadyl's head or all eight limbs of a Nooton. This would only happen if one species greatly outnumber the other, causing an imbalance in the nutrition supply and widespread hunger. As both species were intelligent, they carefully controlled their appetite and maintained a comfortable equilibrium in numbers to prevent decimating each other and, consequently, their own demise.

It should be noted that both species primarily ate other organisms on the planet for energy. What they needed from each other were certain essential nutritional elements that they could not make in their own bodies or obtain from other organisms. Both species probably co-evolved for millions of years to reach the current state of symbiosis. 

Humans followed the data transmitted from E118208 for a few hundred years. Some research papers were published, but the field remained small. Because neither Nootons nor Qadyls developed space travel technology to pose a threat to humanity, interest in the planet cooled off and monitoring became a low priority, leaving the robots to do the boring work year after year. 

This changed when war broke out among human colonies in the neighboring Psi quadrant. A lone vessel escaped the battlefield, carrying a platoon of surviving soldiers, and landed on E118208. Even though the condition was far from ideal, these humans tried to set up a colony, or at least a temporary shelter, on the planet to wait out the war. As the number of humans increased through reproduction and the colony expanded, both Nootons and Qadyls felt threatened and began attacking humans. The conflicts lasted over a century, and all three species suffered heavy losses. 

When one clan of Qadyl fighters finally invaded the center of the human settlement, they were exposed to a large dose of radiation from the human spaceship. In the post-human years, the subsequent generations of these Qadyls grew bigger and sharper claws. Over time, these mutant Qadyls with improved "bioweapons" out-completed all other clans of wildtype Qadyls. Through crossbreeding and competition, after only a few generations, nearly all Qadyls on the planet had big and sharp claws. Nevertheless, they still all needed Nooton tentacles.

Perhaps it was the war with humans or fierce competition within its own species, this new breed of Qadyls tasted the fruits of increasing aggression and sought to produce ever more offspring. To achieve this, more Nootons were needed, so Qadyls began to domesticate Nootons. They capture Nootons from the wild, confined them in small farms, and bred as many as possible. They would chop off all but one of a Nooton's tentacles to maximize the efficiency of production. As Nootons were as intelligent as Qadyls, they were given treatments to keep them docile and content. Wild Nootons disappeared rapidly to the verge of extinction, as those who refused to be domesticated were killed. 

To increase the number of Nootons on the farms, Qadyl scientists developed a technology to grow their brain fungus in nutritional solutions, making it more convenient to support the Noonton population growth, which in turn led to Qadyl population growth. This went on for another thousand years. 

One of the last few Nooton clans in the wild realized that the key to Qadyls' dominance came from the aliens that briefly invaded the planet. So they found the spaceship, now buried and forgotten, and dug out the engine, which still contained radioactive fuel. The Nootons took the material home and exposed as many among themselves as possible. Some Nootons died, but some mutants emerged, who could produce a chemical in one or more of their tentacles that is deadly to Qadyls but harmless to themselves. The Nootons kept this development secret for several generations and devoted all their resources to breeding these mutants and training them for combat, until the mutant Nootons were so numerous that they could no longer hide from Qadyls. 

In the war between Nootons and Qadyls, the Nootons suffered heavy losses but eventually won. They liberated all the domesticated Nootons. Nooton scientists carefully selected individuals carrying the mutant genes to mate with those previously domesticated, while those without the mutant genes were not allowed to produce offspring. Within a few generations, almost all Nootons were now carrying a deadly weapon against Qadyls. 

Even the mutant Nootons continued to need the essential nutrient from Qadyls. However, the Qadyl technology made it easier to grow large quantity of the fungus. Now Nootons only have to keep a few Qadyls around to maintain the source and quality of the fungus supply. Taking to heart the lessons of the past millennium, Nootons decided not to domesticate Qadyls. Instead, they maintained a low number of Qadyls living freely in the wild, their numbers only a fraction of that of Nootons, so that Qadyls would never become a threat again. The two species still needed each other to stay alive, for now. 

In the year 4001, Captain Hilda Chu arrived at the long-forgotten space station and discovered the extraordinary history in the records. 

The Gaze

 

Today I saw some discussion on action movie twitter about Tiger Shroff (pictured above). But I have not seen any of his action movies and am not going to talk about him. Rather, I have been puzzled for a few years now as to why Bollywood is rapidly filling up with ever-more-perfectly muscled male stars. 

Sure, Bollywood (and Hollywood, and profit-driven cinema in any country) has always been full of very beautiful women. The male gaze blah blah blah. The standard for male beauty was always pretty lax. Even the unquestionable No. 1 leading man of the past generation, Shah Rukh Khan, hardly looked like a magazine model at his peak. I am sure Indian cinema had no shortage of heartthrobs back in the day, but the average level of looks alone among male leads was way lower than female leads. 

Something started to change in the 2000s. When I saw Lagaan in 2001, Aamir Khan looked more buff than an average guy, but still within normal range, but 13 years later in PK the older Aamir had even bigger muscles. There was a wave sweeping through Mumbai, apparently, that was forcing every actor, even the big-name ones, to bulk up to ever higher levels of physical appearance. 

Akshay Kumar, himself a martial arts practitioner, once said that he and another actor were the only two guys in Bollywood who had not used steroids. I believe him. I am not categorically against anabolic steroid use, particularly when it is a necessity for one's livelihood. Who am I to judge? But I am extremely curious about the forces behind this phenomenon. Who are they building the muscles for? The female gaze? Or another manifestation of the male gaze? Or both? (In the US context, excessive body-building has a rather ambiguous meaning of both hypermasculinity and homoeroticism, which might not be mutually exclusive.)

I always suspect that Indian popular culture has the instinct to appeal to the most massive of the masses. So it is fascinating to wonder what this trend says about the masses and the time. Whose gaze are these muscle men appealing to? 

The Naples Quartet: Unused Intelligence

Throughout the quartet, Lenu often lamented the waste of Lila's intelligence. Lila did not receive any education beyond the fifth grade, a fact she often brought up in adulthood. Lila read voraciously god-knows-what without telling anyone, including Lenu. At various times, Lenu felt as if Lila was speaking through her (Lenu's) writing by inspiring ideas and firing imagination. As the highest praise of Lila's intelligence and creativity, Lenu constantly worried about being proven an inferior writer, should Lila's own writing be discovered by the world. 

Well, Lila never shared her writing with the world and very little with Lenu. Consequently, her intelligence was considered wasted and discarded in Lenu's eyes. This argument invites a fundamental question: How do we live with unused (i.e., wasted) talent?

Sure, we all immediately agree that it is a bad thing, a sad thing, proof of the oppression and erasure of women. It is all true and correct, which does not preclude one to think about the flip side: Can it also be a natural and honest choice to throw away one's intelligence or not make use of it? 

For someone like Lenu, who represents many of us, it is unthinkable. It is largely because she herself attained nearly all of her life goals through rigorously using every bit of her intelligence, tenacity, strength of will, and people skills. Being smart and hardworking led to good grades; good grades were the currency to win professors' approval and assistance, which in turn sent her to high school and college. Using her talent and mind, she made a living as a novelist and journalist. Everything can be made use of in service of her advancement. Most of all, she had thoroughly mined the history and events of the neighborhood in her novels, which brought her money, fame, and access.

Lila held the opposite view and repeatedly begged Lenu not to write about the neighborhood, its people, and especially Lila herself and Tina. Lenu did not understand this attitude at all and repeatedly agreed and then violated her agreement. One exception to Lila's aversion to publicity is the Solaras. The only time Lila collaborated with Lenu was the articles they wrote to expose the Solara criminal organization, with the hope of sending the Solara brothers to jail. Beyond this, Lila had no interest whatsoever in making use of her story and turn it into accolades, admiration, or profit. 

So, then, what is intelligence for, if one does not convert it to tangible benefits? I must admit I had never thought about it until I read the novels. 

Of course, Lila did not throw her talent away completely. Initially, she used her shoe designs to win investment in a shoe factory for her father and brother. Then she used her interior design of the shoe store to facilitate her affair with Nino. Later, she used her intelligence to help Enzo begin a new career in computers. Subsequently, she made plenty of money from her computer programming skills, not to mention becoming Michele's chief computer engineer. But Lenu still did not understand, because Lila did not want to write, to share herself, with the world. After the enormous loss of Tina, she stopped working, and her insatiable energy and curiosity turned toward understanding the context of her personal tragedy, i.e., the tragedy of Napoli itself, but still she was not interested in sharing any of this with anyone, nor did she want to exchange it for anything, nor did she want to contribute to the progress of society. 

I cannot help but recall my twenties and thirties, when I struggled with the motive and purpose of writing stories and stuff outside of work (where I was and still am paid to write), none of which were published. If I had zero desire to be seen by other people, I would have written nothing. No matter how conflicted I was about being read and understood and liked, the secret desire was always there. As I grew more cynical about human capacity to understand each other and lost some of the need to be understood, the urge diminished and dissipated. But still I don't think I could reach the self-contained satisfaction of using my mind for my own satisfaction alone, with absolutely no intention to be seen and validated --- or just reflected back --- by another person.

Lenu's pride and urge to write and be published and be read are easy to understand. She wanted to leave something behind, proof of her existence and a temporary escape from mortality. In other people's eyes we confirm our own solid existence. Lila represents the opposite, which I have to admit is rare to see in this world but not entirely incomprehensible. Nearly everything in this world is wasted in reality. People's talent and abilities come to nothing all the time. Even the corporations and individuals who earn millions and billions of dollars every year, can we really say they have contributed to human progress at all? How many of their products end up on landfills eventually? How many of them make life worse rather than better? 

Indeed, what if intelligence is wasted? What if it does not produce anything? Not money, not fame, not status, not admiration, not even showing off. It stands alone, all by itself, comes and goes, breathes and lives and dies. So what? So the fuck what?

The Story of the Lost Child

 

The large majority of this novel, minus the final third, has a very clear arc. With a series of unfolding events, we watch Lenu gradually drawn back to the neighborhood, as if led by irresistible fate, or was it her own unconscious desire? 

Nino appeared once again out of the blue and triggered the destruction of the already-wobbly marriage between Lenu and Pietro. Lenu resisted going to Napoli to be near Nino for as long as she could, finding refuge with Mariarosa Airota and her current boyfriend (Lenu's old one) Franco. Things fell apart with Franco's death. The invisible hand pushed Lenu to Napoli. But still she resisted the call of the neighborhood for more than two years, living in an apartment in the affluent area, rented by Nino, and continuing her journalistic work. Thus, she could pretend that she was not circling closer and closer to ... home. 

As sure as gravity, her orbit crossed with old friends and familiar faces. Alfonso, Carmen, then Lila ... Once Lila appeared in her life, Lenu's homecoming was inevitable. She held out for a little longer, until Nino's double life was revealed, and then his multiple lives surfaced. Meanwhile, Lenu's mother was dying. The journey home was so long and meandering that we hardly realized how insistent and inescapable it always was, but every change in her life pulled her closer to Lila and the neighborhood. Finally, she ended up in the apartment right above Lila's. Welcome home.

Throughout the slow and unconscious journey, Lenu continued her lifelong pattern of projecting her own unconscious motivations onto Lila. She constantly suspected that Lila was plotting to drag her back into the neighborhood and use her in Lila's own struggle against the Solaras, even when it was transparent to the reader that she was fighting with her own desire to go home. Such psychological insight is almost unexpected in an otherwise brutally candid first-person narrative, but we all know how everyone deceives herself all the time. We are all unreliable narrators, first and foremost to ourselves. 

For the final third of the novel, however, we are shown the flip side of homecoming. Lenu would never completely belong to the neighborhood like Lila did, because she had left and built half of her identity in Pisa and Florence, with Adele and Pietro and the editors and publishers and academics. The non-Napoli part of herself was as deep and authentic as her Napoli part. In other words, one could go back, but one could never truly be back. The irreversible force is, of course, time.  

Lenu stayed in the neighborhood for more than ten years, in part to protect and comfort Lila in her grief after the loss of Tina, and in part to further her own literary career. Eventually, she left again. Perhaps she finally accepted the reality that she could not entirely fit in Napoli or the neighborhood. No amount of physical attachment can change the mixture in her identity. In the new era, she was as much a stranger in Napoli as she was in Milan or Turin.

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After reading about Elena Ferrante's essays mentioning her admiration for Stanislaw Lem, I can't help but wonder how much Lem influenced her. One of the themes in Solaris is the unknowability of an alien entity, which lately I often compare to the unknowability of other people's mind. Humans do talked to each other and can know a little about each other, but the vast majority of our hearts and minds remain outside of each other's understanding.

In the last book of the quartet, more than any of the previous novels, we are reminded how little we know each other, even our best friends. Lila's actions as well as thoughts and intentions were always just outside of the edges of Lenu's view (one should note that it is by design). From the bits of clues and hints dropped here and there, the reader can piece together a thread of events with a heavy dose of conjecture. Lila's shocking decision to go work for Michele Solara in the previous novel was not some kind of capitulation to money or prestige. She gathered a massive amount of evidence and data on the Solara criminal enterprise, hoping to send them to jail one day. That effort failed because the criminals were rich, powerful, and deeply connected with other powerful networks throughout the political and economic landscape, above and under ground (or as the Chinese say, 黑道白道).  (Sidenote: What a surprisingly relevant observation in current events in a totally different country!) The law could not touch them. For a while, Lila led a peaceful (on the surface at least) but fierce battle with the Solaras and gained an upper hand in the neighborhood. At some point, Pasquale assassinated the matriarch of the Solara family and caused massive chaos. Then the Solara brothers fought back and killed Alfonso, one of Lila's foot soldiers, and regained the upper hand. They were likely responsible for the abduction of Tina, for which Pasquale exacted revenge by killing them. Lila and Pasquale were tragic heroes that fought with the Solara family for years, perhaps decades, and paid a heavy price. 

But that's an entirely different story, one that the author chose not to tell directly. Everything explicit in that story is left out of this one, leaving the reader with nothing but hearsay and innuendo. Perhaps such a story could not be told without a feeling of sensationalism, or perhaps the author does not want to erase the fantastical impression by giving it the full treatment. Either way, it does not belong in this novel.

--------

The disappearance of a child, in particular, a daughter, is obviously of great symbolic meaning to Ferrante, who wrote another novel, The Lost Daughter. There are many possible interpretations of this cataclysmic event in the quartet. In some ways, this is the beginning of Lila's disintegration. If we view Tina as a part of Lila (in a way all children are or used to be a part of their mothers), then her disappearance is a concrete loss of her body and self. In her enormous grief, she discarded her work and connections to the community and her battle for its soul. I see her subsequent wandering in time and space around Napoli as her way of scattering herself around the city, melting and dissolving into the city from which she was never able to leave, perhaps taking possession of it. 

Once could also interpret Tina's kidnapping and probable murder as the patriarchy's violence to erase women, especially on those who refuse to erase themselves. Perhaps the loss of a child is the loss of hope and possibilities. In a city that is old and tired, typified by but not limited to Napoli, the loss of children or youthfulness reflects the calcification of culture and mind, leaving only an ever-shrinking path toward change and progress. The old order would rather go down the road of decay and death than loosing its grip on power for a terrifying new order. This fits with a general sense of lost opportunities since the social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, as the entire world reverted to its relentless conservativism and capitalism for the next half century. For a moment there was a glimmer of hope (or illusion?) of real historical change, but it was quickly snuffed out by the power that be.

Krishna's Practical Amorality (Mahabharata notes #19)

In an article by Hriput Namu Tara that analyzes the morally ambiguous role of Krishna in Mahabharata, the end struck me as particularly poignant: 

Ultimately, the poetic language of the Mahabharata takes us to the threshold, but not the heart of experience. Words, no matter how eloquent, cannot replace experience ... Krishna's ineffable nature, paradoxical and mysterious, cannot but be understood through perhaps a journey that goes beyond any acquired erudite knowledge.

The subject of the article is the age-old debate of Krishna's tricks and deceptions and apparent lack of impartiality in the central conflicts in Mahabharata. He openly proclaims that he sides with the Pandavas and would do anything to help them defeat the Kauravas. Although he does not directly involve himself in the actions, his advice is crucial to the outcome of the war. At each turning point in favor of Arjuna, Yudhishthira, or Bhima, when each of them commits an act against the kshatriya code to beat their equally mighty rival, the story puts the responsibility squarely on Krishna's shoulder. When Arjuna kills Karna when the latter was pulling his chariot wheels from the mud, when Yudhishthira tells the first lie in his life to cause the death of Drona, when Bhima slams his mace into Duryodhana's thigh, the poems says, it is because Lord Krishna tells them to. 

These plot points are sufficient for many readers and scholars to question the divinity or the moral validity of both the Pandavas and Krishna for as long as Mahabharata is in circulation. Nevertheless, plenty and more people continue to exalt the Bhagavad Gita as the ultimate guidance for behavior and dharma and Krishna as the ultimate figure of worship. People continue to feel both disturbed by all the rule-breaking and dishonorable choices attributed to Krishna in the story and compelled by the feeling that he is right --- that his example and advice are truer and more human than any moral education we have be infused with since childhood. 

In some ways, Krishna's cunning, practicality, and attitude remind me of the Old Testament God. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Except Krishna is in no way straightforward. As much as the Pandavas win the war and crown, they are left with fates hardly better than the defeated and dead enemies (in some sense, one could argue that victory is worse than defeat). Krishna himself is cursed, and he does eventually pay the price of a painful and lonely death. The moral ambiguity is sophisticated beyond any religion or mythology that I am aware of, perhaps even beyond Greek philosophy. I have seen a lot of Indian scholars use the word "subtle" to describe the theology of Krishna in Mahabharata. I don't know exactly what they mean, but I would compare it to a warm and glowing ball of hot air hanging in space, emitting powerful electromagnetic rays, defying description and interpretation by words. 

In our well socialized brain, all those tricks, deceptions, and "by any means necessary" practicality (to quote Malcolm X) do not bring us certainty or comfort, but we cannot deny the truth, built upon lived experience. The shock of reading Mahabharata comes, perhaps, from its fundamental difference from all other religions --- we are so used to the routine that we do not question their prescriptive nature, regardless of whether we believe in them or not. In fact, the prescriptive nature of conventional religions is illustrated in Yudhishthira's representation of dharma (never lying is included in his paradigm). Thus, the point-counterpoint debate between Krishna and the Dharma King is but one example of the internal contradictions and co-existence in Mahabharata, where everything is included.