A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter M

Mahabharata

World Religion
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The great Sanskrit epic attributed to Vyasa, detailing the Kurukshetra war and exploring dharma, duty, and human complexity.

Detailed Definition
The Mahabharata is not just a war story but a vast “encyclopedia of life,” containing the Bhagavad Gita, philosophical discourses, and moral parables. It presents dharma as nuanced and situational, embodied in flawed yet noble characters. In poetry, it inspires retellings, allusions, and ethical reflections across South and Southeast Asia. Poets use its characters and dilemmas to examine justice, loyalty, fate, and the cost of action. Its scale and depth make it a mirror for human society—where gods, heroes, and villains reveal the spectrum of virtue and vice.
Example
Example in poetry:
In a modern epic, the Mahābhārata is “not a war tale—but a mirror held to every moral crossroad”; A feminist poem gives Draupadi voice: “While kings debated dharma, I bled its cost”; A minimalist verse: “Mahābhārata: 100,000 verses, one question—what is right when all choices wound?”; A diasporic reflection: “My grandfather recited it by firelight—now I read it on Kindle, but the dilemmas burn the same.”
Additional Notes
The Mahabharata is one of the longest epic poems in the world, central to Hindu thought. Its narrative core is the great war between the Pandavas and Kauravas, but it contains profound philosophical discourses, most notably the Bhagavad Gita. It explores complex dilemmas of Dharma (duty/righteousness), showing that moral choices are often not between good and evil, but between conflicting duties. It is a vast repository of myth, legend, and wisdom.
Also Known As
Mahabharat The Great Epic of India
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