Mahabharat seems to be quite in demand. There are two film makers of different genres who are making the same epic. What's surprising is that both claim that the treatment of their version is different from the other. Mani has started spade work on his film which will be produced by Bobby Bedi.

Rituparno Ghosh who is the other film maker in the run is still on the scripting stage. His version will be produced by Sa Re Ga Ma HMV.

Ghosh has just completed a Bengali film Doshar. He is known to be making his version of the epic with a feminist perspective. He finds Draupadi the most fascinating of them all. His Draupadi is bilingual though he wanted it to be only in English. Other historical battles that we should see in 2006 will be Ashutosh Gowariker's Jodha Akbar, Chandraprakash Dwivedi's Prithviraj-Sanjukta, PNC's Sahib Biwi aur Ghualm and Vishal Bhardwaj's Othello.