Ashley Bourget called her poem “Small Child” – but it contained a big, glaring comment that kept it out of a jailhouse poetry-writing competition. “Now that I’m nearly 40 years old, I ...

At 200,000 verse lines and 1.8 million words, it took more than half a millennium to write the Mahabharata. The epic Sanskrit poem, spanning the tale of love and warfare between rival families, is ...