As I sat thinking about the Mahabharata — the events, every character, their lives, how the story plays out, the war for dharma — something kept pulling at me.
The resemblance. Everywhere.
A patriarch blindfolded not just by love but by his own insecurities and unfulfilled ambitions — unable to see or correct his children’s wrongdoing because doing so would mean confronting something uncomfortable in himself. Two mothers — one who raised her sons with resilience and discipline through every hardship life handed her, steeling them for a world that would not be fair to them; another who blindfolded herself in solidarity with her husband yet warned her son repeatedly, torn between a mother’s love and a clear-eyed understanding of what he was becoming. Both fighting for their children. Both ultimately unable to stop what was already in motion.
A mentor who set aside his entire life for the lineage yet could not stay fair — who recognised every mistake and every wrongdoing but could not act on what he knew. A wife married to not one but five — and yet when she needed them most, not one of them could protect her. Not because they did not love her. But because they had already lost everything in a game rigged against them from the beginning — their kingdom, their freedom, and finally, in an act of audacity that still disturbs me, her dignity. Staked as collateral by men who had nothing left to stake. By a wicked uncle who was an expert at the game and knew exactly what he was doing.
The divine standing quietly with the fair ones. A family tearing itself apart over a kingdom that could have been shared. Jealousies. Revenges. The pulling down of others. Manipulation. Disrespect toward women. The power of money. Fighting for what is rightfully yours against people who were never going to give it willingly.
I could see all of this in the Mahabharata.
And then I looked at the modern world today.
This is not a retelling of the Mahabharata. It is an honest account of why I think it was never just a story — and why I believe we are all living inside it right now.
The Map That Was Always There
I think the Mahabharata was deliberately written to map how humans would evolve.
Not as prophecy in the dramatic sense. But as a deep and precise understanding of human nature. Of how entitlement compounds into conflict. Of how manipulation works in plain sight while everyone debates procedure. Of how the righteous suffer — visibly, publicly — while the unrighteous build empires and enjoy them. At least for a while.
Look at the ratio. Pandavas to Kauravas. Five against a hundred. That is not an accident of storytelling. That is the ratio of those who try to live rightly against those who do not. It has always been approximately this. It might always be approximately this.
The five are not perfect. But they are trying. And they are outnumbered. And they have to go through enormous struggle to save their place in the world. And God stands with them — not because they are without fault, but because they are trying to choose what is right even when it costs them everything.
Every archetype the Mahabharata gave us is walking among us today. You do not need to look far. You will find them in your workplace, in your family, in the news, in the scrolling feed of any given morning. The person born into privilege who cannot bear that someone else might deserve what he has. The one who just wants to be valued and makes a catastrophic choice in that moment of need. The woman publicly humiliated while those around her debate what is technically permissible. The strategist working quietly in the shadows, turning people against each other, never appearing to do anything wrong directly.
The war has not ended. It just changed its name.
The Rumour That Refuses to Die
There are rumours. Myths. A persistent whisper across retellings that Draupadi was the cause of the Kurukshetra war — that her oath, her anger, her refusal to let go of what was done to her somehow makes her responsible for the devastation that followed.
I want to sit with this for a moment.
She was humiliated in a full court. Publicly. Systematically. By men who had engineered the situation to strip her of everything — her freedom, her dignity, her right to be seen as a person rather than a possession. And she responded by taking an oath. By refusing to pretend it had not happened. By keeping the wound visible until justice came.
And somehow — in certain tellings — she becomes the problem.
This is not unique to mythology. Every woman who has ever refused to quietly absorb an injustice has heard some version of this. You could have let it go. You are making things worse. Did you have to take it this far?
But she still stood by her husbands. Through the exile, the years in the forest. Through every humiliation that followed the original humiliation. She did not leave. She stayed — and carried one oath that said: this cannot go unanswered.
Do we not all want to fight against the injustice that happens to us? Is that not the most human impulse there is — to say: what happened was wrong and I will not pretend otherwise?
The war was not caused by Draupadi’s oath. It was Duryodhana’s refusal to give the Pandavas even five villages of what was rightfully theirs that led to war. By Shakuni’s lifelong manipulation. By a court full of people who watched injustice happen and called it lawful.
Draupadi did not start the war. She simply refused to forget what started it.
There is a difference. And it matters.
The Age We Are Living In
The Mahabharata ends with war. Devastating, total, almost complete destruction. And what follows — what the Pandavas inherit — is not triumph. It is a world exhausted by what it took to get there.
We call the age we are living in Kaliyuga. The age where adharma — unrighteousness — is not the exception but the pattern. Where no one is spared in the act of violence. Where the manipulation is systemic, the injustice is casual, and the silence of those who know better has become so normalised we have stopped noticing it.
It feels like we are at a peak. Not the beginning of the darkness — the peak of it. The point at which something has to give.
The Ones Who Fought
A daughter who had a premarital son disowned him out of fear of shame. Not out of cruelty — out of terror of what the world would say, what it would cost her, what she would lose. Even Kunti, mother of the Pandavas, chose the world’s judgment over her firstborn child. The adharma was never only on battlefields. It lived quietly in private moments — in ordinary people making choices they felt they had no choice but to make.
And yet.
There are the good ones. They may not outnumber the adharma — they rarely do and perhaps they never have. But it is still something — a genuinely hopeful thing — to see the rise of people choosing kindness. Choosing empathy. Trying, imperfectly, to live by dharma in their daily lives.
Every family has that one person who will try to protect dharma. And it is almost always the one who has been most hurt by the absence of it — the one who understands from the inside what it costs when dharma is abandoned — who stands for it most fiercely. Not the comfortable one. Not the powerful one. The one who is sensitive and empathetic — who feels the weight of injustice almost instantly, and who has probably been called weak for all the right reasons.
This is not a story about women or about men. It is not about one community or one country or one generation. It has come to a point where the accumulated weight of adharma feels like it has no natural reversal — unless something larger intervenes. A huge wave of divine grace and collective conscience — the kind that does not ask who deserves it first — that can reverse what has been building for generations and bring the balance back.
The Mahabharata called this moment inevitable. Not because it is easy. But because there is a limit to how long adharma can sustain itself before the weight of it demands a reckoning.
We may be living at that limit right now.
Choosing Dharma
I want to believe dharma prevails in the end. But I will be honest — I am not certain it is that simple.
Dharma does not prevail on its own. It prevails because people choose it. And choosing it is a tedious, uncomfortable, costly thing. It puts everyone in an uncomfortable state. It disturbs the peace, asks you to stand up when sitting down would be easier, asks you to speak when silence would be safer.
There is a very fine line between dharma and karma. Between what is right and what simply feels just from where you are standing. I am still learning to find that line. Still choosing, imperfectly, daily, with a great deal of resistance.
But the alternative — to stop trying, to stop asking the question — feels like a different kind of defeat.
The Pandavas won. But the world after Kurukshetra was not triumphant. It was exhausted. Almost everyone they had ever known was dead.
And yet dharma prevailed – not cleanly, quickly, or without devastating loss. Because people chose it — even when it cost them everything.
We Are All Living Inside the Mahabharata
The Pandavas are still here — in every generation, in every era, in every situation where someone chooses what is right over what is convenient.
In every family that has one person who stands for dharma when everyone else looks away. The woman who refuses to let her oath go unmet. In every person who has been most hurt by the system and chooses, still, to protect what is right within it.
They are outnumbered. They always have been. But they are here.
And God — in whatever form you understand that word — is still standing with them.
The question the Mahabharata keeps asking — in every age, in every life — is still the same.
What will you choose?