“Does it matter? How and when it was said
And done for the benefit of the mankind?
Be grateful that you are here to listen
And blend it into the immortal soul and mind.”
It was one of those days when the old man
Made the three eager listeners sit and stare
At his toothless mouth get into action,
Talking about what was wrong and what was fair.
Confusing names and complications apart,
They would sit every week to try and dissolve,
Whatever they could get from the greatest epic
Of good guys and bad guys and the Lord above.
They never understood the relations,
Nor did they care about the time and place,
All they knew was it contained a secret,
Of a life of bliss and an infinite solace.
They knew the heroes and they knew their feats,
They knew about their battle of sorts,
While some were mere words and rhyming games
Others were made of physical efforts.
The good guys were five brave men,
Born in strange places and for stranger reasons,
While the remaining one hundred of them,
Were evil people who fought all seasons.
There were grand old warriors and new born ones,
There were beautiful princesses with grace galore,
There was magic happening all the time,
To show each one’s beauty and valor.
There were contests and tests of all the kinds,
Where these men displayed their wits
To win the hands of gorgeous creatures
Or lose them and be shattered to bits.
And then there was the trickster Himself,
Smiling and winking his way through it all,
Playing His flute to entertain His beloved
And to pick these men up at every fall.
There was foul play and deceit all the time,
People trying to outdo the other,
Sometimes things were neat and no bloodshed,
But at the look of things, a war could not be farther.
And so it came, the Mahabharata,
The battle of good versus the bad,
The just had to win for the sake of infinity,
Since being good has never been a fad.
Just before the war could begin,
One of the brave men loses his strength,
At the thought of killing his own kin,
Just in time for the Lord to speak at length.
For days they speak back and forth
About the various phases of a human life,
While the brave man argues that his own blood will spill,
The Lord reminds him that it’s a fair against unfair strife.
While the disheartened warrior learns about
The values and meanings of being alive,
The listeners watch the old man’s eyes shine with tears,
As he speaks of the true ways to survive.
At the end of it all, The Lord displays his forms,
He says, “Its your duty that you do and nothing more
To achieve salvation and a goal to live,
Since you are not forever and you were never before.”
He says, the birth is no more than a cloth you wear,
Which you shed after it has been used,
And try another one all fresh and new;
The listeners sit there, amazed and bemused.
Enlightened by the omnipresent,
And his duty as a warrior and a part of the all-pervading,
The brave man picks up his power bow
To vanquish the evil face of every being.
Days later, when the battle is over,
Kings and dynasties have ended as dust,
Some of them are martyrs, others are traitors,
But truth had to prevail, as it was fair and just.
The tale ends with the brave men becoming emperors
With their own kingdoms for good or bad,
But an epic has been made for all mankind,
To look back at when they are bewildered or mad.
The listeners move on with their lives,
The old man retires to his good old grave,
But the sessions they had follows them forever,
In rural life and in a living so suave.
But even today, when they happen to see,
The Lord with His ever so soothing stare,
They say to themselves, with a smile on their lips,
“Oh! Come on. You could have played it fair.”