Scene 1
Battlefield of Kurukshetra
The great battle of
Kurukshetra is all set to begin. Arjuna makes his way to the middle of the
battle field on his chariot with Krishna as his charioteer. Seeing all of his
relatives on the other side of the battlefield, Arjuna becomes depressed and is
confused if fighting them is indeed the right thing to do.
Arjuna tells Krishna, “Over
the other side, I see Drona. He is my guru, the great warrior, he has taught me
all I know about warfare. Next to him is Bhishma. His love and wisdom lies
within myself, within my heart and my soul. How can I fight people who have
helped me become what I am today?”
Krishna tells him about his dharma. Arjuna is still not convinced.
Then Krishna tells Arjuna.
“Alright mate. You don’t want to fight, fine? You don’t care about adharma triumphing over dharma, fine. How about this, I’ll keep
a condition for you. Go to an engineering college in India, complete four years
of baccalaureate degree course. If you think you can do that, then forget
Mahabharata, forget the kingdom you are rightfully supposed to inherit which
you have been unethically denied. If you can complete that four year course
successfully in due time, I’ll agree to your points of view and I’ll steer your
retreat from this great Kurukshetra.”
Arjuna thought about the
moral dilemma confronting him and decided that it would be much easier to go to
an engineering college and earn a degree than to face his own relatives in a
battlefield.
Scene 2
Entrance examination center
A puzzled expression dons the
visage of Arjuna as he stands in queue before the mandatory frisking before the
beginning of the engineering entrance examination. His face certainly belies
his state of mind. He had come in his royale attire, donning the gold jerried
dhoti and his customary bow-and-arrow. He
is puzzled that he is quite an object of attention of the entire chunk of young
men and women around him. Arjuna was quite used to looks of admiration and
obedience he used to get from his subjects but the looks he was getting now was
none of that. None of them are wearing dresses that Arjuna could comprehend.
And he was surprised he had to stand in queue, waiting for his turn. Back in Kuru
kingdom, he was always privileged to skipping ahead of
queues but people did not seem to recognize him. So he stood, in that
sweltering heat wondering if he had indeed made the right decision.
The queue inched forward
slowly till Arjuna finds himself standing in front of a gruff security officer.
As soon as he set his eyes on him, the security officer unleashed a torrent of gaalis Arjuna had never even heard
prior! His confusion is momentarily cleared when the officer shows him a memo
from the examination board. It read, “Don’t bring any device or anything along
with you which can create trouble for you better to avoid things like hair
band, cap and scarp, nose pins, bracelet, earrings, bow and arrows, watches and
mobile phones.” Silently, Arjuna hands over his bow and the quiver of arrows to
the officer who then pushes him to another officer. He thrusts the same piece
of memo in front of Arjuna, a different statement is highlighted. “As per the
new rules the candidates are advised to wear light clothes shirts and T-shirts
having half sleeves which do not have big buttons, generally avoid wearing
fancy type clothes.” Arjuna, clad in his dhoti and not wearing anything
equivalent to the modern day shirt or T shirt, is again left in the lurch. He
silently curses Kali Yuga
as he makes his way to the nearest garment store to find something that fits
the requirements for appearing in the entrance examination. He made a mental
note to ask Krishna next time, whatever the challenge, do not send him to
undertake a task in Kali Yuga….
Scene 3
Engineering
Arjuna stands with pride in
front of the gates of the engineering institute into which he got admitted
into. Though the feat of appearing for the entrance examination seemed much tougher
to Arjuna than clearing the examination itself, he is nonetheless proud of
himself and is looking forward to show Krishna and the other Pandavas his
entrance examination results card when he returns. Focusing on the task at
hand, he pushes open the gates only to find a huge mob of youngsters charging
towards him. “Good God,” he thinks, “This seems it is much more of a
battlefield here than Kurukshetra itself.” As the mob appears closer to him,
the faces of the individuals on the frontline belie their state of mind. If he
had his bow and arrow, Arjuna could have taken down however large a mob with
his arrows but he felt naked now without his bow. That darn flight journey to
college, they didn’t allow weapons to be carried on the flight, he had to check
those in with his check in baggage and in the true spirit of Kali Yuga, the airlines
had misplaced his checked in bags. Arjuna was helpless and didn’t have Krishna
to turn for advice. However, his survival instincts told him that the best way
out in this predicament was to turn around and run as fast as he could. He
attempted to do just that but he was a moment too late. The leader of the mob
caught him quite effortlessly.
“Who are you?” he barked.
“I came to join this college
for first year engineering,” a tame Arjuna replied.
Huge guffaws accompanied
Arjuna’s answer. “Do you know who we are?” quizzed the leader of the mob.
“No, I don’t.”
Slap! Before Arjuna could
react, a hand had reached up and slapped his cheek. “We are your seniors. From
now on, you are our junior. And all juniors are our slaves.”
And thus began Arjuna’s life at
an engineering college. He would be in the middle of completing his engineering
drawing assignment due to be submitted tomorrow when he would get that dreaded
call from a senior to withdraw money from the ATM. As per Murphy’s law (he
realized that Mr. Murphy had simply renamed Kali Yuga after him, he planned to
write a thesis about Mr. Murphy copying from India’s religious heritage
sometime during the course of his degree), the nearest ATM would be out of cash
and he often ended up travelling to the other end of the city to find an ATM
that had enough cash. A day before the mid-term examination is when his seniors
would feel the need to have their rooms cleaned before they started preparing
for his exams and Arjuna was called upon for doing the cleansing. Arjuna’s
number seemed to be on speed dial for all concerned. When any of the seniors
ran out of money to pay the dhobi to wash the clothes, it was upon Arjuna to
wash their clothes till their accounts were refilled by their parents the next month.
Buying alcohol (absolutely against his beliefs, mind you!) or a smoke in the
middle of the night, standing in queue bunking classes to reserve railway
tickets for seniors, you name a menial task, Arjuna had done that in his first
three months. The icings on the cake were when he went to a driving school,
learnt driving a four wheeler and appeared and passed a driving test as a proxy
for one of his seniors who was too lazy to do all that.
Among all this, he had to
manage studies as well. Although in terms of time and effort committed, studies
lagged far behind multitude of other commitments (most happening of which are
afore-mentioned), he managed to push along his coursework as well. He used to
get so many redraws and repeats on his engineering drawing assignment that he
strongly came to believe that his instructor of that subject was a descendant
of the Kaurava clan. Engineering workshop was another highlight of the first
semester. The T-joint which he had made as a part of his carpentry assignment,
an elephant could pass through the wedge hole. Mathematics and Physics were all
about derivatives and integrals. It started with first level derivatives and
integrals but by second semester they had gone to double differentiation and
surface integration. It seemed that every semester added one additional level
of integration and differentiation, he shuddered at the very thought of what
awaited him at the seventh and eighth semesters. After he added water to a huge
beaker of sulphuric acid, there was a mini explosion of sorts in the Chemistry
lab and he was given a damages bill that to him, didn’t seem much different
from the semester fee bill. And to top it all, after a tiring day of classes
and labs when he came back to the mess, they served him two rotis and a dal
which had cooked of a healthy proportion of a dozen grams of dal in a liter of
water or so. Staring into his katori
of dal, which, if it was a lucky day, would contain couple of dozens of pieces dal,
he reminisced about the royal food he used to get when he was with his
siblings.
Scene 4
Battlefield of Kurukshetra
As in the first scene, Arjuna
is sitting on the chariot behind Krishna. He has a sullen look on his face.
Krishna smiles and asks Arjuna, “So, were you able to get the degree? Should I
turn the chariot around?” Arjuna looks up to Krishna and says, “My Lord, please
don’t taunt me. I confess I underestimated the challenge you threw upon me. I
thought that it would have been much easier to get the engineering degree and
that would have avoided the predicament wherein I would have had to face my
uncles and relatives in this epic battle. But now, I realize, getting an
engineering degree in Kali Yuga is much more impossible than fighting and winning
this battle. Now I do not have an iota of doubt in my role in this world. Steer
the chariot straight ahead my Lord. Let’s go get ‘em.”
And Krishna turned forward
and the horses galloped to the center of the battlefield. And the rest, as they
say, is history….
