Labyrinth || Azfar Hussain

I've always been interested in the question and history of what's called "labyrinth," whose origin is customarily traced back to Greek mythology, although, in the Indian epic _Mahabharata_, something resembling a labyrinth called the "Chakravyūha" or Padmavyūha" appears. It's described as a multi-tier defensive military formation--one that looks like a "chakra" (disc) or even a blooming lotus when viewed from above. The epic character Dronacharya used this formation in the famous battle of Kurukshetra and baffled the shit out of his opponents. The two writers I used to read quite a bit--Borges and Umberto Eco--have used the images of the labyrinth a great deal in their work, although they don't seem to be familiar with the epical "Chakravyūha." A Chinese Maoist once laughingly told me that Mao himself was familiar with it, although he forgot to talk about it in his pamphlet on guerrilla warfare. Hahaha! I don't mean to aestheticize the labyrinth, but Patrick Conty's book _The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth: Architecture, Hidden Language, Myths, and Rituals_ made me realize how a labyrinth may offer a staggeringly wide range of both beautiful and baffling patterns--and patterns within patterns--while challenging geometricians of all kinds (although I gotta tell you that some of those poststructuralist textual labyrinths can be most uninteresting).