Script and screenplay writer of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, Carrière’s film and theatre adaptation of the epic led to an interminable dialogue between him and India. The intensive research and learning opened a whole new way of thinking, not as in the clichéd West-East exoticised perspective but in an understanding of the elemental life force that dwells in the streets of India. It is from him that we must now relearn what we have forgotten. That the Mahabharata goes beyond religion and territory. It is in fact, a handy manual, a survival kit beneath the metaphorical allusions, that is universal in context. Carrière, in his brilliant screenplay, revealed just that. A universal philosophy.

Editor: You are considered a man of intense curiosity. How did it open your window to the world?
Jean-Claude Carrière: As a little boy, I lived in a small village surrounded by mountains not knowing anything about the rest of the world. Very early, I felt a desire to go beyond the mountains. I knew there was another world, but I could not see anything of it; not even pictures in the papers. So my curiosity, as you call it, was born quite early, when I was eight or nine years old.