A lot of time
and effort is wasted by people trying to date the war of Mahabharata as
a means to prove the indigenous Indian origins of the so-called Aryans.
Let us take a soberly critical view. There is little doubt that the
great story is predominantly a work of fiction. That does not mean that
the idea for the story could not have arisen from a factual battle. Can
you imagine a prescient set of parents naming their royal son
Vichitravirya, which translates into "Weird Semen". No wonder the
poor kid could never perform as an adult! As was the local custom a half
brother comes to the rescue. As he was half-black and aptly named
Krishna Vyasa, he had an air about him. Considering the lasciviousness
of his father and the easy virtue of his mother, he was so well endowed
that the first queen closed her eyes at the site of his naked splendor
and the second queen’s heart went into palpitations. These resulted in
Lamarckian inheritance that made the first queen’s child blind and the
second queen’s child weak hearted and proved Darwin wrong before he was
born. I wonder why the intelligent design crowd didn’t cite this
evidence in their US Supreme Court case?
Then the blind prince marries an Afghan woman who dutifully blindfolds
herself thus doubling the handicap. No wonder our president is focused
on improving the lot of Afghan women. She has the adopted familial
difficulty in conceiving and seeks the help of prayer. She tires of her
embryo and lacking an artificial womb puts it in a jar, ultimately
divides it into hundred parts and they grow to hundred neonates all in
clay not even in vitro. She is afflicted by the perverse familial trait
and names most of the children Duryodhana, Dushasana etc. all meaning
bad this and bad that. Talk of all these children left behind. A pity
the shrub Dubya wasn’t there to rescue them. By the way bandaging
one’s eyes gives one laser vision when they are uncovered. This vision
can give invulnerability to naked human skin when focused on it or
incinerate anything the lady disapproves off, as her son Duryodhana and
nephew Bhim both learnt to their dismay. No wonder the Bell Labs
scientist who helped perfect the laser was an Indian.
In the meantime the second prince’s wife is experimenting with an
artificial divine inseminator, which she uses first without prudence and
subsequently with abandon including a final threesome. There’s a new for
"The Pleasure Chest". I wonder why the archeologists don’t try to find
out how this magic toy surfaced in the Middle East over a millennium
later to start another scourge of humanity. Anyway blindness being the
favorite pastime no one notices that she is pregnant even though she is
not married at first and most husbands in the ruling dynasty are
complacent and broad-minded about being cuckolded. Take that you hippie
communes! You thought you invented open marriage.
Then there are the weapons of mass destruction that were used during the
Mahabharata War. No wonder Bush the lesser had to give India a free
pass. Why it is the only other country that used nuclear weapons besides
and even before America, making it fit to join the five hypocrites of
the UN Security Council. The feeding of multitudes from an "akshayapatra"
or from a loaf and fish transcend reality and reason. These alone prove
with certitude that we are not dealing with a factual transcript, even
embellished like Thucydides "History of the Peloponnesian War".
Similarly the Ramayana is full of flying invincible monkeys and Rama
walking on water (over floating stones), a common asinine myth of
another religion (now walking on thin ice both literally and
figuratively). Then there is the much oppressed Sita which literally
means a furrow in the body of the earth as opposed to Ahalya which means
untilled or unfurrowed. Talk of the overuse and under-use of wives! They
maybe great propaganda for liberated feminism but do not need to be held
up as models of behavior and emulated like the real Sati who jumped in
the sacrificial fire of her father, to redress his lack of offering to
her husband who seemed to relish being smeared with ashes and being
wrapped up with snakes.
Other myths offer the reward of parting the Red Sea in exchange for a
snippet of penile foreskin. This is how American ad agencies learnt that
offerings of skin sells any product. Sundry prophets have hallucinated
and sanctioned polygamy, intolerance and cultivated hair as a fetish.
All these reveal blind dogma and faith. See the dangers of a little
knowledge! The universal hope of a redeeming avatar, messiah or mahdi is
doomed to perpetual disappointment as both Clinton and Bush Jr. have
proven to the American voter.
Myths are meant to enthrall the reader and at best falsely but
imaginatively explain some observed fact. The abduction of Persephone by
Pluto led to the sadness of her mother Demeter who had to share her
daughter with him for six months in a year. This is why the grieved
earth is barren from fall to spring and yields a bountiful harvest from
spring to fall. The self-absorbed handsome Narcissus ignores the love
calls of stricken Echo who pines away, while her cries resound. The Moon
god with thirty wives is extremely partial to Rohini and thus is cursed
to die, but reprieved by clemency to wax and wane with death in the form
of darkness, once in thirty days. The arriving Aryans unused to a
compact three month rainy monsoon concoct the story of a demon Vritra
who envelopes all the water and is stricken by the thunderbolt of their
king of gods, Indra. The black cloud Vritra is mortally wounded and
bleeds releasing the water (his blood) as raindrops. The myths were
created to imbue meaning and sometimes even have morals. These like the
Mahabharata, Ramayana, the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey are great
stories and the work of creative genius, sometimes studded with morals,
but have little to do with truth, factual history or the word of gods or
other non-existent creatures.
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