This web1 publication is a reprint of Mahabharata with focus on readability on modern devices. It is a "clean internet" publication.

  • cheeseburger on top left toggles the chapters' sidebar. On mobile devices, you may swap right.
  • search the publication using the magnifying glass:
  • turn pages by clicking the left and right angles: . On mobile devices, the angles show up at the bottom of page.
  • you can also navigate with left and right arrows on keyboard.

Clean internet

The way oceans are filled up with plastics, the internet is infected with countless cookies and trackers. Some of them useful for the functions of websites - but most to profile the users - to serve them pesky ads. Put together, they have turned the internet into a surveillance apparatus.

An immune response is the rise of freedom tech - privacy tools - VPNs, ad-blockers, encrypted chats, and scramblers. These tools are not only complicated, they make internet slow. My aspiration is to provide a reading experience as it was meant to be - Cookies free , Trackers free, Advertising free - without the reader having to use privacy crutches.

A publisher may infest webpages sometimes unknowingly. Plug and play code such as Google Analytics are easy to install if not pre-installed. They however breach the sacred trust between a reader and publisher. A good reading experience is not only a readers' right, it is also a good design choice - it makes pages load faster.

In order to keep their services free - email, search, social - likes of Google and Facebook turned the internet into an advertising platform. Every click is analysed at the perils of reading experience - to place clickbaits. But If you thought they were the only culprits, you would be surprised ! CNN uses as many as 21 trackers! And most other trusted names are equally bad.

As a reader, you have options to block cookies through browser settings. But most of the time such choices are binary - yes or no. If you chose "No", you won't be able to load most of the websites. In effect, such settings are useless to an average user.

A better compromise is to use duckduck go privacy extension. It stops trackers (and cookies) that are there for the sole purpose of profiling, but it allows those needed for the application functions. Not an ideal case but still the best among available options.

As a rule, and design imperative, I don't use any trackers or cookies whatsoever. You can test it through "duckduck go" privacy extension.

The goal is NOT to fight ! Internet is too big to change and all models of content delivery may co-exist! It is only to do my part as a digital native - leave the place as clean as I found it.

Open source tools

Since web-browser is a general purpose application, fine-tuning it for readability is somewhat a necessity. I use an open source publishing tool mdBook to bind2 these pages into a book-like reading experience. The web-app thus created has many features :

  • It handles layout and responsive design, so my mind stays on the content - instead of technology.
  • It keeps the essential book experience intact - even on a tablet or smartphone.
  • Website may be installed like an app. Browser based apps are called progressive web apps. They can be installed on computers or smart devices for offline reading.

Content is written in Markdown on Vim - both open and time tested. I mostly use Debian - a fully open distribution of Linux.

Theme

The theme is a custom design. A golden background with black Alkatra fonts form Suman Bhandary. I have restricted other standard themes3, such as rust, ayu or navy because this custom theme is the (only) one I test from readability standpoint.

Favicon

The favicon4 for this web-app is a Trefoil Knot. Trefoil is the first non-trivial knot - it can't be simplified into an "unknot" (a circle). In Vaidik thought trefoil (triguna) is the fundamental Karm Bandhan. The three colors indicate the three basic potencies of creation - the color charges of particle physics or the three gunas of Vaidik science.

Cover photo

The cover picture is a pencil sketch of Ganesa by Madan Maholvi.

In Hindu mythology, Ganesa is the embodiment of superior intelligence. Ganesa being the mind child of Siva represents the supreme consciousness. As per Vaidik science, the evolution (rise of consciousness) takes place to answer the question - "who am I?" The limitation, however, is Ganesa can't suggest the questions, he can only provide the answers. Framing the right set of questions is thus left to the evolution.

One who has all the answers doesn't know of any question!

Licence

The publication is under creatives common v1.0. Which means everything is under public domain. Mahabharata and it's translation by Kisari Mohan Ganguli is also in public domain

The fonts used are under SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007

Style

  • The content is designed for reading in a desktop or tablet5 browser.
  • The background color is Gold #f9ce00
  • The font is Alkatra.

Tips and Donations:

Tips normally mean you are happy with your worker. Donations are something that show you support a cause. I may be wrong in my definitions - but you can't go wrong in supporting this work - either "tips" or "donations" - both are welcome. You can use the donation box below to send money in Satoshies - commonly called Sats. Sats are convenient because there is no credit card involved or computations for the exchange rates - it is one simple global money for the internet.

To send Sats with above widget, you will need a "lighning wallet" . I normally use Alby as a browser extension on desktops. On mobile phones, the choices are endless. Depending upon your jurisdiction - a simple "lightning wallet" search in your app store, would show you all the options.

You can leave a small note with lightning payments though all transactions are practically private. Which means I can't know who sent the money unless you leave a clue in the message.

notes and other stuff:

1

This publication aspires to adhere the original promise of the internet. A universally accessible, anonymous and clutter-free way to communicate. Free internet is beautiful. It is the biggest library and the web-browser is the most used app. Some benefits of reading on the internet are

  • Truly decentralized and open system - There are hundreds of web browsers - offered by the biggest of corporations to the lone developers working off their garages.
  • Open source alternatives - many browsers are fully open sourced such as Firefox.
  • Omnipresent - Browsers are available for every platform. For popular graphical platforms such as Mac, Windows, iOS or Android, the choices are practically limitless. Even for pure terminal users there are many choices - w3m, lynx, elink to name a few.
  • For writers, advantages are many. Prime among them is shaking off intermediary publishers and content aggregators. In addition, simple HTML allows infinite customizability. For tech-savvy writers, markdown offers easy scribing. And the best is that publishing direct to the web is 100% free.
  • The content published directly to the web is future-proof in the sense no matter the evolution of devices from desktops to smartphones to AR/VR headsets, the open internet content will always be available. The content locked in platforms such as Wikipedia or Facebook will always be subject to the policies of aggregators. It may go behind a paywall at a short notice, as happened in case of Medium.
  • Universally accessible - Nation states may ban big platforms such as Twitter in China and TikTok in the USA, it is almost impossible to censor individual websites published directly to the internet. Even if that happens, changing the url isn't complicated. Nostr protocol is all about censorship resistant perpetual content!

Browsers are particularly suitable for the long text ..

  • Easily reach the embedded links for references and jump back in at your reading point. You may laugh off this point as "obvious", but if you are reading on apps or devices such as a "kindle", this feature may not be as easily accessible. You will need to anyway fire up a browser.
  • With text to speech plugins, most major browsers offer AI based reading. Which means you can listen to a page on demand and possibly in many voices. With onset of AI revolution, this feature is going to further improve. Days are nit far that every web page would sound like a well crafted podcast.
  • Offline reading - Yes, a page once loaded, can be viewed as long as it isn't refreshed. You can always save a page as a file on your computer with a single press of ctrl+s on most browsers.
  • Notes and bookmarks - One of the most interesting thing on the web-browser is to take and save your notes on the note-taking app that you regularly use. For example on Android, I normally use "Google Keep" for my notes. Simply select a piece of text on the page and share it with Keep. Google will not only save store and let you edit your notes later, it will also bookmark the exact place on the webpage where you picked up the note - again, it's not only a link to the webpage , it is to the exact lines your selected on the page. I use this feature not only to take a note but also to store my bookmarks in one place. For example if I am reading say five different long posts on blogs or news sites, I just share a line with my Keep to remind me where I left the page
  • Word meanings and pronunciations - simply select a word or phrase, right click and most of the browsers take you to a dictionary. "Safari" makes it even more intuitive with a little dialog box that pops on the word. On Chrome, you can install "Google Dictionary" extension and Firefox's most recommended add-on for the spell is "dictionary anywhere" among hundreds others.
  • If you are into keyboards and shortcuts, then browser is something you already love. There may be some nuances for different browsers may implement different key bindings for the same shortcut. Or the shortcuts may be different on Windows v/s a Mac. One of the way to circumvent this problem is to use plug-ins such as "Vimium". Vimium or similar plugins are available for the big threes - Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Vimium implements uniform bindings based on "vi" that is almost like a universal standard, available for not only browsers but many editors, spreadsheets, photo galleries and countless other applications.
  • You can save a snapshot of a webpage as a legal proof with open archive's "wayback machine". wayback machine allows you to catalog web pages even if the site is totally removed from the internet.

That said, the reading experience on Browsers is compromised! You don't think of a web browser when you indulge yourself into a four hundred-page book! This is partly because great content is NOT carefully "webbitized" but more because being the most open and used application, browsers are targets of prying eyes. Advertisers want to track your eye movements with trackers and cookies :-) Search engines and most content providers clutter the page with clickbaits. Instead of starting a twitter campaign, I thought why not create an ideal online resource (myself). And that morphed into kinda mission for this work.

2

mdBook takes the written words in "markdown" format and churns out a fully deployable webApp.

  • markDown is a "translation engine" that translates a piece of simple written text into HTML that is easily understood and parsed by web browsers. You still need to follow markdown notations. It is not a bad deal because markdown notations are lot easier than typing HTML tags.
  • markDown is pre-built into mdbook. It thus takes the text written in Markdown format and converts it into a static website that looks and feels like a book. You still need a server to deploy this website. And you still need to connect it with a domain name.
  • a static website is something that doesn't change its content till a new version is deployed.
  • Since static websites put minimal load on the web-servers, places like GitHub or Gitlab allow free hosting and publishing. They also allow connection to your own domain name if you have one.
  • If you are a Nostrich you already know you can publish text to any number of nostr relays - a much better option for the writers because you are not tied to one walled garden, and you can possibly monetize your work.
3

Theme

  • Modern web-apps, offer a multitude of 'Themes' - the fonts, color combinations, and the font sizes.
  • Though choice is a good thing, it is almost impossible to review the text though all the possible combinations. Thus, a lone writer-editor must choose one to preview the write-ups (:- . It was much easier in older times when all books had the same white-ish color and all words were mostly a shade of black :-)
4

Favicon

  • The little picture right in front of your browser's url bar (where you type the address of the website such as https://gita.shutri.com) is called a favicon.
5

This content is “designed” for ‘in-browser’ reading experience on a laptop or a desktop. It should work pretty well on Tablets and Smartphones, even on a Kindle browser (if you want to read it in the bright sunlight), but the mainstream browsers ( Safari and Chrome ) are purposefully kept dumbed down on smart devices. For one, you can't install extensions or "add-ons" on most of the browsers on smart(er) devices :-) I prefer Kiwi Browser just because it allows me the ability to add extensions. Kiwi uses open source Chromium project as the base along with web kit. Highly recommend.