Meet Mr. Karna, My Neighbour

This thought has been almost latent in me for about a decade. I concieved it when a serial Mahabharat was relayed on some equally antiquated channel. It is some thought which, like many people i too had in me, a something which, when venerating The Great Manager (The GM, better known as Mr. Krishna), pinched me time and again that why on earth would he, the know-it-all, would spur someone as skilled and intelligent as Arjun to kill an equally talented Mr. Karna. It was a pity that such a nice and talented guy got murdered in such a fashion! My friend RK (Ra Ku, let's name him, who lives in Nehru Hall of Residence, despite being my hall's Namesake, RK) exclaimed. It was not the first time that i was catering to this complaint. A googol number times have i been pulled into such vortex of questions that i had almost lost interest in this field. Then why am i PriLogging this here? Perhaps i learnt something more relevant today discussing this with my friend than discussing it with people (how could i discuss it, when i was about 8 yrs old when i heard it for the first time? It was unjust for me then, to assassinate someone who was just trying to fix his broken chariot. Then i had considered it as a shameful deed, indeed, both on the part of the doer as well as his mentor!).

These days RK has again been watching that old epic and feels jubilant while discussing it. Nothing wrong with it, till the time we all are learning from it. So, as most of the time, i and RK were on foot journey to some terra incognita when he popped up that particular question in question, in his imperative tone Mahabharat is a bunch of Conmen!! a good inference for a good epic. He has his right to opinionate on anything as per his wishes. I was not surprised. I asked him the reason for his such belief. He threw the exception (yes, my english has been mechanised) Karna was killed when he was just fixing the wheel of his Chariot. The same vortex revisited. Okay, let's face it! i thought. I started my explanation like this Karna was an intelligent person, knowledgeable too, and equally talented as Arjun as far as the question of bow and arrows was concerned. It was his inferiority complex which let him down. The prime motto of his life was to satisfy his internal complex, and not to develop himself. It was his backwardness of thoughts which marred the lusture of his knowledge and manhood. He had been a warrior all his life, a good thing, but a lost warrior, whose motto was to concentrate on surroundings and people's opinion (which of course was not very good) rather than being the work itself. So he never devoted his 100 percent self to anything, as a result of which he was a failure.
It was conspicuous that RK was unable to comprehend this. I further explained to him, Take an example of JEE or any test. Suppose you are writing the answer and all of a sudden the tip of ur fountain pen gets disaligned, would you start re-aligning it, or take out another pen and start rewriting it? I winked at him. He said, smiling, I got it!! Encouraged, i said further Tell me, what were your limitations in JEE? Let's drop it! He said in a stern tone. So much for understanding the issue! I understand that such topics are not easy to fathom, and following it is certainly a big issue. Seems like RK forgot to mention about his neighbour Mr. Karna.

This Neighbour of his, has also been a neighbour of mine for quite sometime, when i failed in JEE, when i failed in my class, whenever i failed. I had been complaining through out these 5 years that society never had any high regards when i was a failure, instead, they hurled stones at me. It was something which i never expected of my relatives, the society it was then. What i forgot was that i never paid any regard to myself, then how could i expect something out of others? It was a period of depression, inferiority complex, self- abnegation and self- abasement, which was wrong on my part when i was focussing on these things, and not on the bull's eye! In the first place, the expectation from people to behave in an alleviating manner, if not expecting equality, is wrong, because then, everyone will be Maryada Purushottam (the way he responded to Shabri, the native woman). The world is not about the ideals, it is about the practicality.

Rather than looking here and there when we slip, if we get up and restart running in the race, it would be much easier to win the race, and we would be doing justice to our work. And this is what The GM said.

As far as justice towards Mr. Karna is concerned, the legend further says that The GM asked for his last wish when Karna was on his deathbed, and he asked for a place for cremation where noone had been cremated earlier. The GM searched for any such place but he could not find it on this whole earth. It was because in some civilisation or the other, a given piece of earth was used for crematory purpose. So, The GM acquired his Grand Form and cremated Mr. Karna on his palm.
What i believe is that The fire which cremated Karna was the knowledge about his own self, which released him from the pain and suffering of inferiority.