For my Curious Canadian Friend..!

The Statue represents an important moment in that great epic of ours, Mahabharata.The epic is about the two warring group of cousins: Pandavas and Kauravas. Yet to put it so simply is being grossly reductive. Like any great classic (think of Iliad and Odyssey) Mahabharata is not about one linear storyline and one crux. It is made up of a great array of characters and there are all their stories to contend with; besides ofcourse philosophical and religious discourses and discussions of morality. So much so that the author (or rather the compiler/anthologist of this epic), the sage Vyasa says something like, What's not in this is not found anywhere else, and if it is not found here then it is nowhere else. Such comprehensiveness!

The statue depicts a charioteer, and a warrior with his bow and arrows. The warrior Arjuna is one of the greatest heroes and archers in Indian mythology. One episode vouches for his powers of concentration and his ardent love for his craft. His guru Dronacharya asks his pupils
(Pandavas of whom Arjuna is one, and Kauravas who are a hundred in number and his led by Duryodhana) to aim at a bird perched upon a tree (I think it is a bird or it could be a fruit such as the mango) with their bows and arrows. Then he asks them one by one to describe what they are able to see. Ajuna alone says that he can't see anything else than the eye of the bird he has been aiming at. Befittingly he wins his wife Draupadi (Interestingly Draupadi is the wife of all the Pandavas-five of them in all and not just Arjuna) at an archery contest. In the epic there are only two other warriors who come close to beating Arjuna in archery. They are Karna and Ekalavya. Yet both are handicapped by others' schemings that it only serves to reduce the glory of Arjuna: It raises the classic 'If only...' questions.

The charioteer is no ordinary charioteer. He is Krishna. He is such a multifaceted personality that there are so many ways to describe him-charmer of women and one of the greatest lover in Indian mythology, cowherd, counsel for the Pandavas, philosopher, schemer of the wisest and vilest kind, charioteer, and a king in his own right..! Krishna was greatly instrumental in the victory of the Pandavas over Kauravas in the Kurukshetra war (fought somewhere near present day Delhi). Without getting overly judgemental let me just say that all that was done by Krishna to bring victory to the Pandavas wouldn't come across as being wholesome. One can put a finger on a lot of other characters in Mahabharata and finally (even though with the greatest of difficulty and vacillation) say whether the character has been good or bad. Such a judgement, in my view, is not possible to carry out on Krishna. And in a way it is only befitting. Some points of view hold that God for most parts has nothing to do with the man-made morals; that the Lord acts in mysterious ways not all of which we can be readily understand and Krishna afterall is one of the avatars (roughly incarnations) of Lord Vishnu.

Now coming back to the Statue...The Pandavas and Kauravas are all lined up as the worst of enemies. But they are cousins and hence Arjuna sees so many of his grand relations (uncles, cousins), his guru Dronacharya and so many of his acquaintances all lined up on the other side. He thinks of the lives he has to take, the bodies his arrows have to fell-they are all his relations, his dear ones. He hesitates and wonders if the success shall be worth all the dear lives he has to get past. Even though he is convinced that the Pandavas have been wronged and that Dharma (roughly translated as Justice, virtuousness, righteousness) is on their side he is now paralysed by confusion and the contemplation of immense grief and disaster. Then Krishna on the eve of the war appears in all his Godly glory and advises Arjuna, which forms the cornerstone of Indian Philosophy: The Gita, the essence of which is often paraphrased as, 'Perform your duty without expecting the results'.

In your scrap book you could probably name the statue as, 'The Sermon at the Battlefront'.