During my summer vacations, I spent a month at my grandmother’s house, and in a small town like Dharwad, there wasn't really much to do after visiting the playground in the morning and  the lake in the evening. So, obviously the best way she could entertain me was through stories, like most grandmothers. We would sit in the hall — me on my grandfather’s easy-chair and her on the sofa — as she told me tales of heroes and monsters, what it meant to be brave and honourable, and what it meant to be cruel and unjust — all through the stories of Indian mythology. And after she ran out of the stories she knew, on my 11th birthday she bought me the complete collection of 'Amar Chitra Katha'. 

Around the same time, I discovered the world of 'Percy Jackson' — the story of an 11-year-old demigod who just wants a normal childhood but is forced into quests, essentially fighting to save a world that often seems built for him to fail. Needless to say, I was obsessed. As I continued reading, I began to notice striking similarities between Greek mythology and Hindu mythology. And between the release of the 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians' Season 2, Christopher Nolan’s 'Odyssey' trailer, and Nitesh Tiwari’s 'Ramayana', with music by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman, it felt like the right time to talk about this.

The similarities between the two worlds are striking. Both mythologies have gods for every reason, season, and occasion, and if you think about it, the Pandavas, much like Percy, are technically demigods, born to a human mother and a divine father. The Mahabharata itself can be seen as one long quest, filled with monsters and obstacles on the heroes’ paths to victory. There are apsaras who resemble nymphs, and Hanuman (in Ramayana), also a demigod as the son of Vayu, the god of wind, whose bravery and immense strength are central to the success of the quest to save Sita. In this way, he mirrors figures like Pegasus, the heroic steed born of Poseidon, who carries Zeus’ thunderbolt. These parallels reveal how myths across cultures rely on the same narrative DNA. They're all stories of lineage, courage, and destiny, suggesting that no matter where they originate, myths ultimately speak a shared language about what it means to be human  and remembered.

Ancient Greece and ancient India were once rather intimately connected through trade and conquest, particularly after Alexander the Great’s campaigns, which led to the rise of Indo-Greek kingdoms in north-western India and sustained cultural exchange for centuries. Beyond direct contact, scholars argue that many parallels in Greek and Indian myths stem from their shared Proto-Indo-European linguistic and cultural roots, which produced common archetypes such as sky gods, warrior heroes, and epic quests. Comparative mythological studies further show how these narrative structures recur across both traditions without implying direct borrowing— pointing to a shared mythic framework. 

Even though the fabric of these two worlds seems to be stitched from the same threads, the way they are presented to contemporary audiences is vastly different, shaped largely by who is telling the story and who it is being told to. Greek mythology enjoys a kind of narrative freedom that Hindu mythology rarely does, primarily because it no longer exists as a living, widely practised religion. Greek gods can be rewritten, humanised, mocked, or dismantled without the weight of present-day worship, allowing creators to openly explore their flaws, contradictions, and moral failures. Hindu mythology, on the other hand, remains deeply entwined with everyday belief and identity, which makes reimagining its gods a far more sensitive and complex act.

This is why creating an Indian equivalent of Percy Jackson is not just a creative challenge, but a cultural one. The assumption often is that portraying gods as imperfect or morally ambiguous somehow weakens faith. Yet, the Mahabharata itself is deeply critical of moral absolutism and constantly interrogates the limits of divine authority, placing the burden of ethical choice squarely on human shoulders. The divine fathers of the Pandavas, despite their immense celestial power, are unable to prevent the catastrophic war, nor can they shield their sons from its consequences. In this sense, the Mahabharata is not unlike the world of Percy Jackson, where the gods are distant and often negligent, leaving their children to navigate danger and loss on their own. In both narratives, gods may set events in motion, but they rarely step in to resolve them. Sometimes, they even enable conflict. (Ahem, ahem, Ares.) 

I grew up on fantasy. I spent the better part of my childhood and young adulthood looking for the ring or the wardrobe, waiting to be sorted into a house or claimed by a god as their daughter. The hold this genre had on me was magical. Myths offer us an opportunity to make sense of a world that is rarely fair and never simple, and that is perhaps why these stories endure. They remind us that heroes are shaped as much by their choices as by their lineage, and that even gods are bound by limits.

They are stories of a kid running through the streets of New York with his friends, armed with a pen that turns into a sword, trying to reach the 600th floor of the Empire State Building because that’s where Olympus is. And in finding these similarities between the two worlds, we are not flattening tradition, but recognising how vital storytelling is for a civilisation’s survival. We need stories — of all kinds. Stories about a man who takes ten years to get home because he insulted a god and keeps getting distracted by monsters and situationships. Similarly, we also need stories about a child whose faith annoys his father so much that a half-lion god shows up to solve the problem. Through these deeply flawed, morally ambiguous characters, stories and myths keep asking us the same enduring question:

What does it mean to remain human in the face of forces far larger than ourselves?

Stream 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians' on Disney+ Hotstar, with a new Season 2 episode every Wednesday.

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