I was reading one of the great classic Hindu epics recently, the Ramayan. It is a great story of a king losing his well deserved kingdom, going into a jungle to live off fourteen years and then at the fag end of the period of isolation, losing his wife to a demon and through his friends, recovering her back.

The hero of the story is Ram, who is revered as God in Hindu religion and who has temples all over the place in India.

The epic has many lessons for we ordinary mortals : how to stay firm even when you have to lose everything, how to win friends, how to influence people and how to win everything back by being supremely confident of yourself. Great read. Great lessons.