KARNA - The lost Soul

Mahabharat is as we know, one of the two epics of the Indian history. The other being Ramayana. Undoubtedly Mahabharat is more detailed and complicated of the two. With so many characters and situations Mahabharat clearly stands out as the best literary work by the Aryans.

Starting with the Aryan invasion into the Sindhu Ghati (Indus Valley) it describes the growth and expansion of the Aryan empire in India and completes with the end of the greatest dynasty of the yog – The Kuruvansh.

This kuru dynasty was bestowed with great warriors and rulers including Raja Bhaghirath who was responsible for bringing the Holy River Ganges to the planet earth from the heavens; Raja Bharat after whose name the country was christened as Bhaarat; Devarath, the son of river Ganga who was trained by Guru Bhraspath himself in the heavens and finally the Pandavas lead by Yudhisthir followed by his grandson Parakshit (son of Abhimanyu) who apparently was the last king of the dynasty.

All these characters and many more like Vasudev Krishna, Guru Drone, Dhritrastra, Panchal Raj Shakuni, Duryodhan, Anga Raj Karna etc make this epic memorable and fascinating.

Of all the characters mentioned above, the one that interests me the most is Sut (schedule Caste) Putra Karna. He was brought up by a chariot driver who worked in the royal family. Karna from the very childhood realised that he was bestowed with divine powers and was destined to achieve great heights. Unfortunately he was born in an era when cast was based on birth and not on ability. He suffered a lot of mental pain and agony as he would never get a chance to brush his talent of archery as no pronounced teacher would teach him for him not being a Kshatriya. Left with no other option he tricked Guru Parshuram to teach him the art of archery by convincing the Guru that he was a Brahmin. But that was soon disclosed and Guru Parshuram disbanded him. Thus he had yet another abrupt end to his education. After this he tried a number of times to showcase his talent but was never awarded a chance again due to cast distinction.  

All this had created such an impact on his mind and soul that now he would do anything to get the due respect. At this juncture came a turning point in his life. There was once an archery competition organised by the royal family and all the royals were invited to exhibit their talent. Karna with great enthusiasm and zeal went to take part but Maha Mahim Bhishm restricted him from doing so stating that a Sudra could not take part in such a competition with the royalties. Duryodhan accompanies the greatest opportunist and strategist, Panachal Raj Shakuni cited the opportunity recognising that karna had great powers and roped him in by backing his strengths and bestowing him with the throne of Anga. Karna hungry for respect as he was, got so obliged by the gesture that he wowed to stay loyal to Duryodhan through all thick and thin.

From this point on Karna just had one point to prove – Great warriors are not born only in the families of Kshatriyas but even a Shudra like Radha could give birth to the greatest Archer of all times. To prove this right the only way he could think of was to fight and defeat Arjuna – the acclaimed Ace archer of the Kuru dynasty. And he knew, he shall get many chances to do so being in the good books of Duryodhan who was more than eager to cross swords with his cousin Pandavas. Hence knowing that Duryodana was not the right person to be a successor to the throne he supported him incessantly. And as is said –

                 ‘kajal ki kothri mein kaam karoge, to kalit to lagegi.’

Karna as well on many occasions commited deeds that his soul would not permit him to do but he had to for the sake of his friendship with Duryodhan who gave him respect by giving him the opportunity to be a ruler of Anga.  Thus Karna, for respect, lost his soul in the bargain. He was so keen on getting the due admiration that he overlooked everything else. He would not even listen to the suggestion of his parents and his loving wife who tried a lot to persuade him for staying away from Duryodhan. But to his credit a man with so much capabilities, if does not get an opportunity to exhibit and get the due respect for the same such repercussions are obvious.

Indeed he got a few opportunities to fight Arjuna in the due course but either Guru Drone or Paitmah Bhishma would intervene and stop the rivalry. This would increase his frustration and anger even further.

And finally the Great Fight ‘Mahabharat’ was scheduled between the Kauravas and the Pandavas to be fought on the battle ground of Kurukshtra. Karna took it to his stride and was ready to contest Arjuna for one last time as he was determined for bloodshed. Now came a bigger twist. Kunti the mother of Pandavas discloses that Karna is not a shudra by birth but a Kshatriya. Surya Putra Karna was born of the womb of Kunti with the blessings of Lord Sun. But as this happened when Kunti was still unmarried, she abandoned Karna fearing the embarrassment from the society.

This was the biggest turnaround and the most interesting point in the life of Karna from my point of view. Kunti gives him an option to join Pandavas assuring him that Yudhisthir along with his brothers would accept him as the eldest Pandav and he would become the King after the battle. Wow dream come true. Karna has got a the fairy tale ending to his sorrows. All his life he wanted the repect that a Kshatriya King gets. All his life he hated himself for being a Shudra and wanted to be a Kshatriya and here it was – he is a Khsatriya Born of a Kshtrani Kunti. Now he has no reason to be sad. He can live his dream. The flip side – now he has no reason to fight and kill Arjuna. He wanted to do so just to prove that a Sut Putra can be better than the best Khsatriya. But he is not a Sut putra so even If he kills Arjuna he would not be able to prove anything. So happy ending all is good now. Pandavas along with karna can go and defeat the kauravas and Karna would be the biggest Ruler of the Bhaarat Varsh.

Karna now has no identity. He is not a Radheya, not a sut putra which he was all his life. He is confused, he know not what to do.

Why? For reasons best known to him. He desides to fight on Duryodhan’s end and wants to kill Arjuna his own younger brother because he has gone so far in the rivalry that he cannot back out? What the hell.

I just don’t understand Karna as a character. When we started he sounded a very strong guy fighting the odds of the society to gain his place and by the end he is a card board figure who has lost his soul and is merely following orders of Duryodhan.

What  a waste of a talent.

Dhoni - the fish who is contaminating the pond.

Finally Dhoni is on the verge of getting what he deserves - disrepute and kick on the a** to be thrown out of the Indian Cricket Team. This man has won all the trophies possible and along with that has also achieved what the greats Like Sachin Dravid Sourav Laxman Shrinath Yuvi Sehwag Zaheer Bhaji kumble and all others tried to eradicate - MATCH FIXING. He has brought down the entire past generation of cricket to shame. He has ruined the game at its face. Something that was a gentleman's game now has become a game of money and glamour. It is said that  Captain can make or break the voyage and in or case Dhoni chose to do the latter. All thanks Dhoni & Co. no one now trusts the calibre of the team when we win neither applauds the opposition when we lose. At the back of our mind, the thought of the match being fixed constantly plays.

In the year 2000 when some senior players of the Indian cricket team were named in match fixing probe, the entire country and the cricketing world was in a state of shock. It had quaked the team to its roots. Coming out of the disarray seemed virtually impossible and the future of the Indian cricket team was blurred. But as it is said ‘when going gets tough, the tough gets going’. In an era when the team was on the threshold of being written off, the world saw one of the best players ever to adorn the blue jersey. Under the leadership of a very dynamic Sourav Ganguly, players like Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh, Virendra Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Mohammad Kaif and many more nurtured. Such that Team India went on to become one of the best teams playing international cricket. Some greats like Sachin, Dravid, Laxman, kumble carried on to master the sport in a way that cricket fans would cherish till the game survives.

                                     

Amidst all these the greatest achievement by this team was that no one could point a finger at them. They were what we call Men of Honour. No money could ever purchase their dignity and dedication towards the sport and the pride for their Motherland. Considering the fact that, it is the most followed sport in India and thus making the presence of bookmakers inevitable. It cannot be denied that these greats were approached with hefty sum of money but never was there an instance when they succumbed to such temptation. May be that’s the reason why some of these players are respected as Gods of Cricket.

Nonetheless history had to repeat itself and as always such golden era was to be followed by a dark age. The generation next, that got spoon fed and received everything served to them had to disrespect the hard work and dedication put in by the past generation. Dhoni & Co. completely got into glamorisation of the sport. They have all the achievable feathers in their cap but unfortunately lost the respect of the cap in the bargain. Never in the past has match fixing allegations been so obvious that it has been an open secret. It is something that everybody knows but tends to forego. Sponsors and bookmakers now have such a strong say in the team selection that the selectors and team management’s role is gone with the wind. Cricket at times seems better scripted and directed than movies that where written by Salim – Javed. Ever heard of the saying -‘Truth is stranger than fiction’? Since time immemorial, mankind believes that impromptu work can be more entertaining than something that is thought out and planned. But incidentally these players have started to believe otherwise.

Is this the end of a Golden Era of Indian Cricket or just a phase that can be curbed down with proper action? 

Being Biased or Chivalry

In the last season of the television show - Bigg Boss, the host Salman Khan was termed as biased by many watching and ardently following the same. Some said if Salman can so strongly advocate the eviction of Kushal Tondon (accused of hitting an inmate intensionally) he should have done the same in case of Tanisha Mukherjee pushing him.

                                               

I in here, have a couple of very simple and straight forward questions. Which one is worse - a man hitting a woman or a woman hitting a man? Secondly, should you sacrifice principles and rules for money?

To start with the first one, i think man hitting a woman is totally demeaning and unacceptable and cannot be justified under any circumstances. Merely for the fact that by definition man is supposed to be physically stronger than a woman.

At the same time a woman hitting a man is even worse and more often than not i would blame the male counterpart to be at fault. Women are gentle, sensitive, caring and by nature nonviolent. Hence if a certain woman hits a man imagine the magnitude at which she is hurt so as to have compelled he r to become violent. Hence a man who has forced her to reach such an extent should be punished.

                                                

In our context, Kushal, who had no personal grudge against Tanisha still target her in the ‘Box’ task and many others to come (later on claiming that it was because of the clash between Gauhar and Tanisha). He himself got out of the box in less than a minute or so which clearly indicated his disinterest in the task. Now if he goes on to generate plans on how to evict the competing group and concludes that targeting Tanisha would be easier than the rest is clearly unjustifiable. Why was he so interested in winning the task all of a sudden? If you can go to such an extent, trying to anger a lady whom you had claimed to be your sister-like in the initial day of the house, Tanisha’s act of pushing him aside was completely justifiable and so was of the host Salman Khan who tried to explain things to a certain Kushal Tandon. If this is biased then i guess Cavalry is dead.

                                 

Secondly, when kushal was banished from the house on the grounds of intentionally hitting Andy ( another house mate) certain viewers desired to have him back and for the TRP and monitory reasons Kushal was called back into the house. If the channel has made a rule that hitting an inmate would not be permissible on any grounds/ under any circumstances then I guess they must have the dignity to abide by it. On the occasion of kushal being eradicated from the house, his friend Gauhar (again for whom the fight between Andy and Kushal was instigated) left the house along with Kushal stating Bigg Boss was unfair on doing so and she would rather leave. If that be the case, I wonder what light of knowledge she got overnight which alarmed her to return (Possibly monetary reasons). So in here we see three very strange but prominent elements of the society-

1. The producers of Bigg Boss, who once evicted Kushal for what he had done and then recalled him for no given reason. Can Bigg Boss Producers justify this? How for money and TRPs they compromised on principles.

2. Similarly for Gauhar. If she believed in Kushal and thought he was justified, why would she return unless kushal was taken back? Reasons might be pretty much same as in the first case.

                                         

                                           

If the host, who also is an individual and member of the human society, raises his voice against all this and condemns them for behaving in the manner that they did, IS HE BIASED against Kushal? Knowing the fact that Salman Khan has no occasion to be against Kushal Tandon who happens to be from his school, who claims to be a big fan of the actor, will he for no sane reason impound his own fan? One more thing I shall want to highlight, that is about the comments that kushal made after eviction and the ways in which he behaved apparently to gain publicity at the cost of Salman Khan. He must be reminded of the fact that once upon a time an aspiring actor tried to do the same calling upon press conferences and shit to defame salman and gain popularity today he barely exists in the industry. So chap try attaining success through hard work an and dignity rather than finding an easier way out that would take you nowhere.

                                                 

Why is India still a ‘Third World’

Allan Bloom once said, “Education is a movement from darkness to light”; is it so?

36% of the scientists in NASA are Indians, 34% of the Microsoft employees are Indian, we have 4^th largest army in the world, India has the second largest pool of Scientist and Engineers in the World, we export software to more than 90 countries, 66% of our total population is youth below 35 years of age and in spite of all these and many more we are still considered as the THIRD WORLD.

If I get into the ‘why’ debate, it can be manifold but for me the major reason for us still being a so called developing nation (which in itself is a paradox), is lack of indigenous ideas. In my course of life, I have come across people from almost all spheres and strata of the society. As per my observations and as proved by the above mentioned facts, Indians by no means lack talent and abilities. We have the capability of executing any given plan, materialising any strategy but what we lack in is - formulating them. Name a software or a gadget and we shall develop it faster and better than people of any other country in the world, show us an industry and we will master it, give us a sport and we play it better than you. What we are not able to do is - generate ‘new’ software, create a new gadget, come up with a new industry. Basically we are lacking innovation. Why 34% of the employees in Microsoft are Indian but not one of them could create a similar sector? Why in spite of 36% of the employees in NASA being Indian, we are not the first one to reach Mars or Moon? There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve – the fear of failure.

This is all mainly because we are becoming good followers, great performers but we need a guide, we need someone to tell us what to do. For me this degradation in the Indian mentality can solely be blamed on our education system. From the very start we are taught to learn and spill it in the exam. Our education system hardly ever gives us scope to be innovative. I remember during my school days nobody would dare to come up with a creative idea for the fear of failure or losing out on marks. None of us would try something new, give it a shot, at least make an attempt to think out of the book. Everyone would merely study what was there in black and white and vomit the same in the answer scripts. Creativity has been crushed by this system. This I say because it is not that we do not have the capacity to be indigenous or innovative, but this very ability has been destroyed. In a recent judgement, the Supreme Court of India stated - It is unfortunate that today education, in our humble opinion, appear to have failed to achieve its objective It will have to be stated that we are yet to reach the preliminary level of achievement of standardised literate behavior.

Now when I sit and think, I realise my initial days in the University of Glasgow, where we were divided into groups and were asked to develop a completely new product, design the business ideas and generate plans to materialise them. If my memory doesn’t ditch me, all my Indian friends in the class actively participated in the course work, helped the group in developing the plan but none of us could take the credit of coming up with the idea of the new product. But after a year’s education, when at the end it this same set of students were given yet another course work of similar sort, this time we all could come up with our own innovativeness. Hence a good education system did help us nurture our abilities which were somehow unmoved for so many years.

The competition has become so fierce that we are scared of generating ideas, we fear of losing out in the race. So tough has life become that we don’t dare to experiment. We are happy to lead the life by the formula. The zest to learn something new, to try and perform something different is almost lost. We are simply waiting for others to create things and then we follow or adapt the process. The fear of failure has got on us like a deadly virus. I wish we can change the pattern of education, I wish my countrymen can overcome this fear of failure and have the courage to be innovative. That I guess is the only way we can break out of this ‘third world’ tag.

why do we work?

Last weekend I came back home from office pretty late and was all tensed with work load. We were to go out for a family dinner. I was in no mood to go out and wanted to stay back. This was not the first time I was in such pensive mood due to work. It had become a custom in the recent past. Well nonetheless we went out for dinner, came back home and when I was about to go to sleep, papa called me to his room as he wanted to talk. 

I went to him and he taught me the most wonderful philosophy of life. He started firmly by asking "why do you think you work?" pretty ordinary question I guess. I replied saying "we work to earn money, to get successful or may be because it's fun to work." 

Papa: Not exactly. We work to lead a better life; we work so that we can earn enough to enjoy the pleasures and luxuries of the world. We work so as to have a fun filled peaceful life. Nobody has forced us into work. You are doing it by choice. If work is putting you under such pressure that you are not able to enjoy life, you feel tensed every time then the basic ideology of working is defeated. It indeed is important for you to apply your brains at work, get involved, give your best shot but at the same time do take advantage of the worldly pleasures. Go out and party. Enjoy the life. The tension and hardships related to work should be left back at the office. Once you are home, don’t carry your strain with yourself. We work to live we don’t live to work. To work is not the ideal of life. The basic objective is to lead a nice life. Now to lead a nice, comfortable and happy life, work is necessary that is why we work. If work is not allowing to lead that kind of a life then stop working because you aren’t reaching your goal.

This wonderful piece of advice from him apparently has changed my life. A complete turnover I must say. Such a beautiful thought which was so nicely and calmly described by him.

should we change with the change in situation ?

One who changes with time is not a man. Again, one who does not change with time is not a man.

To start with the first one, a person whose attitude and perspective changes with changing situation is certainly not a man of honour.  For instance, if with sudden change in one’s life he or she becomes arrogant, selfish and starts behaving differently; then, the person would not be held with high esteem. Such change can be anything, an upliftment, a failure, a loss or success. If a man succumbs to a particular situation and allows the circumstances to rule his/her nature and mode of living, the character would certainly not be admirable. Hence, this section of the debate says - come what may, the basic soul, the innate qualities of a man should not change.

The second side of the debate says, if we don’t change with the changing circumstances we cannot be considered as a man. We’d rather be programmed robots or any such non-thinking, non-living object with practically no brains to adapt. Now, this contradicts the first thought, where changing is rather unscrupulous. But if we don’t change, we aren't growing and if we aren't growing we are not living.

Speaking for the motion, it might be at times necessary to change or adapt oneself according to the scenario but then, in the process we just happen to lose something in ourselves which was good and noteworthy. Whereas on the other side they say, “we might lose something good, but we may gain something even better”.

Having considered all the thoughts bumping into my brain cells, I can conclude in the Shakespearean way as he once said “people don’t change; only their costumes do”.  What I mean to say is with changing time and circumstances, the basic characteristics should be retained while the peripheral qualities might be adapted and modified to suite the demand of the situation.

Might be a bit out of the context but this reminds me of my school Principal, Mrs. Kak, who would always tell us that there is a kid in us and come what may , growing age or changing life, we should always let the toddler in us alive. For according to her, only kids can live and enjoy life and the day the child dies we shall not be living but just be ageing. 

Why being in love is important

To be in love is the best feeling/emotion that God has blessed the mankind with. And no, this is not about loving your parents, siblings, cousins, relatives or any such other person. Of course all of them do have a very important role to play in our lives but then, there is this someone special whom we don’t get as a relative since birth but whom we choose from the crowd of a zillion. A standout soul that makes us feel that we are complete. We have all at some point met this somebody who is different from the rest, for whom we care, who looks familiar at the first sight, for whom we get this urge to be with, someone who means so much to you that their mood effect yours, someone purely magical. 

There are many opinions that float around us regarding the consequences of being in love. They say it distracts you, curbs you, weakens you, some even say love can be the greatest cause for your commercial failure. For me, being in love is completely different. Being in love actually gives you the strength and reason to do and achieve something beyond your grasp. Romance in life helps you feel good about yourself. When in love, you get this urge to prove yourself, stretch your abilities, broaden your horizon. William Shakespeare was rightly quoted saying “Love asks me no questions, and gives me endless support”. And all of this has nothing to do with whether or not your loved one is with you. It is not romantic to be with whom you love; to be in love itself is romantic.

 Never should we run away from this awesome feeling of being in love for the fear that we may lose, or even worse, never get to be with the beloved. As Groucho Marx once said “It is better to have loft and lost than to never have loft at all”. Only a person who has been in love can understand life, the marvels and beauty of nature. From personal experience I can say when I am not in love, when there is no such special one in my life, there seems a great void, an emptiness that bites your soul. The world around appears dull, everything is so spiritless. You have nothing to live for.


Finally I would conclude saying Love doesn’t make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. So do not run away from love. Love someone, be loved by someone and life would be a fairy tale.