Nalikar & Mattoo's foolish Mahabharata

I read in Scroll India that 

A new book draws parallels between stories in The Mahabharata and modern-day politics

There are none. Modern politics does not feature incarnations of God.  

An excerpt from ‘Strategic Choices, Ethical Dilemmas: Stories From The Mahabharat,’ by Aruna Narlikar, Amitabh Mattoo, and Amrita Narlikar.


Perhaps the biggest difference between the two sides is that at a meta-level, the Pandavas are really fighting for dharm, while the Kauravas are fighting purely for their self-interest.

No. They are fighting over territory. If Karna reveals he is the eldest Pandava, there will be no war. The other Pandavas will follow the dharma of obeying the eldest as if he were the patriarch.  

But if one observes the cousins not with a bird’s-eye view but closer to the ground, the differences blur. Duryodhan and Karn are both complex and interesting characters who reveal much generosity, loyalty, kindness and open-mindedness.

They represent the thymotic code of the old Warrior Prince. Yuddhishtra represents a new type of ruler who focuses on governance and encourages the immigration of merchants and craftsmen so as to have an economically thriving polity.  

Equally, at different points in the text, the usually moral Pandavs also show themselves capable of fatal deception, wickedness and cruelty.

Not really. They merely observe 'apadh dharma'- i.e. alter tactics under exigent circumstances.  

In any case, we believe good lessons are to be learnt irrespective of whom they come from, heroes or villains.

You can learn nothing from the Mahabharata if you think of it as Super-Hero comic with heroes and villains.  

This story offers at least three useful lessons, which are applicable to the everyday.

It offers two lessons

1) If you are an agent due your duty as it objectively appears

2) If you are a principal, try to use statistical game theory or, you are stupid, imitate what smart people are doing.  

The first lesson is about sportsmanship.

Fuck sportsmanship. What matters is maintaining team morale and getting your peeps to play nice with each other. Duryodhana fucks up in that regard.  

The Pandava side and even the great teachers of the Kuru clan tried to disqualify a promising competitor from the tournament by resorting to rules of caste and class.

Which is fine. You try to keep a superior player off the other guy's team by saying 'he's a ringer or over-age or under-age' or whatever.  

In doing so, they behaved in an unsportsmanlike fashion.

Nope. Sportsmen are welcome to insist that a rule which favours their team be upheld. It is unsportsmanlike to shit into your hand before shaking that of the Captain of the other team. 

In contrast, Duryodhan made the case that a courageous man was worthy of kingship; expecting resistance to this theoretical argument, he went on to act upon it by crowning Karn the king of Angadesh, and thereby firmly levelled the playing field between Arjun and Karn.

He thought Karna could beat Arjuna. That's why he raised up to Princely rank. The trouble was, Karna wasn't a team player. He wasn't even committed to Duryodhana's cause. He just wanted to fight Arjuna. He promised his Mum that, whatever happened, she would still end up with five sons- i.e. if he killed Arjun, he wouldn't kill any other brother.  

Admittedly, Karn’s challenge to Arjun would have pleased Duryodhan in the first place, and likely led him to be favourably inclined towards Karn. But in all that he did in this regard, Duryodhan acted singlehandedly; he may have had the authority to do so, but he still showed moral courage by going against his teachers and elders. In sports and in real life, we can all stand up to ensure inclusiveness and fair play.

This is utterly stupid. A Team Captain who discovers that a girl- or a dog (as in Air Bud)- is a better player will argue till his face is blue that the girl or dog or gorilla should be allowed to play. Nowadays, I suppose, the Captain of a girl's lacrosse team would say a big hairy fellow who puts on a blonde wig for the occasion must be deemed to be a 13 year old girl.

The second lesson is on the importance of seeing people for who they are and their potential, irrespective of titles.

But 'titles' affect the potential of a person. That's why it is worth giving them out or taking them away.  

Karn was fortunate to have been blessed with a very attractive appearance,

this was irrelevant. Beyonce is prettier than Mike Tyson. But we don't want to see Tyson beat the shit out of her in the boxing ring.  

but his lack of a title was enough to disqualify him from the contest for the Pandav side as well as the elders in the congregation. Duryodhan, in contrast, chose not to get distracted by convention; instead, he saw potential in Karn and acted upon it. Sometimes, it is worth taking a chance on the apparent underdog.

These cretins don't get that Karna had already shown he wasn't the fucking underdog. Since the MhB is 'Noetherian', we should ask what is the 'dual' of the crowning of Karna? The answer is, it is the crowning of Ashwathama. The Pandavas defeated Drupada on behalf of Drona who gave the crown of the northern half to his son. Why is this important? Between them, the two were responsible for the complete uprooting of the lineage of Ved Vyas. That's why both of them have to be Kings- i.e. principals, not agents. Otherwise the karmic mathematics doesn't add up. 

The third and perhaps most important lesson of the story is how much damage exclusionary systems of caste and class can do.

But if a Suta or a Brahmin can become a King, what fucking exclusion existed?  

A foolish narrow-mindedness (that disregarded ability and prioritised social status) on the part of the wisest in the Kuru congregation reinforced the divisions between Karn and the other sons of Kunti.

So what? Society didn't give a shit which bunch of warriors was slaughtering which other bunch of warriors. The point about the caste system was that 'total war' was avoided. The professional warrior class had their own rules as to who got to rule what. Like the Vyadha, in the Vyadha Gita, nobody else was affected. I suppose the big 'universal' Empires based on 'homonoia'- i.e. same rule set for everybody- arose once mass mobilization of infantry against an elite class of chariot warriors became economically feasible.  

It is possible that Karn – a major protagonist in the great war – would have joined the side of dharm had he not had to frequently endure cheap jibes and public humiliation from the Pandav brothers on account of his seemingly low birth.

Don't be silly. Krishna himself tells Karna that he should claim his birth-right as the head of the Pandavas and thus gain the crown of Indraprastha. (I should explain, Hindu Law was that the son born before the wedding still belongs to the husband provided the son agrees)  

The caste system in India is a shameful case in point, but the lack of social mobility and high barriers to people of colour in Western societies are also illustrative of this problem.

These stupid cunts are virtue signalling. They know very well that Western Societies have top leaders with names like Kamala or Rishi.  

Merit and achievement can come in all shapes and sizes and deserve to be recognised and rewarded irrespective of where they come from.

Merit in killing people should not be rewarded. It should be rationed. You need a Society where the Army is small relative to the productive population. Fuck does these nutters want? Gang wars in every district where merit in shooting and stabbing, regardless of age, class, gender, religion, is rewarded greatly?  

We don't need 'merit' or 'achievement' we need productivity which means specialization and division of labour in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. 

The story also offers several insights that are relevant to questions of governance as well as foreign policy. In some ways, the treatment meted out to Karn by the great gurus and heroes of the congregation is reminiscent of how countries of the Global South are (even today) treated by the West.

The West is sinking. There is little point screaming and shitting yourself over some humiliation Whitey inflicted on your people centuries ago. Either you raise the productivity of your country or else you get poorer and poorer while doing more and more affirmative action for disabled transgender goats.  

The anachronistic Permanent Five membership of the United Nations Security Council is an illustration of this:

Nehru refused a seat.  

despite the fact that countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa and others have emerged as major players on the ground, not one of them has yet been welcomed as a member of a reformed High Table.

Because they are weak, shitty and likely to get shittier. India could still end up under Rahul Baba. Modi isn't invincible. Will Brazil be able to deter Venezuela from taking a big bite out of Guyana? I doubt it.  

Just as the great and the good in the story refused to update the rules, so also do we see a reluctance of the erstwhile Great Powers to update and reform membership criteria of old clubs.

That has happened. Communist China took Taiwan's seat. But India had been offered it in the early Fifties. Japan doesn't want the hassle. Pakistan and China would object to India getting it now. As for Brazil and South Africa- they have shitty leadership.  

And the analogy does not end there.

It ends up the arses of these two shitheads.  

The current overtures coming towards democracies, especially from the United States under the Biden administration, and to a lesser extent from Europe, suggest the making of a system of like-minded powers from the Global North and the Global South, which share core values.

Fuck off! Sleepy Joe and comatose Kamala are taking America back to isolationism. As Obama said, its foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit.  

Look more closely, however, and there seems to be no dearth of hand-waving and finger-pointing on “democratic backsliding” in the developing world, which come from researchers and policymakers (often from the Global North).

But then Biden has to go fist-bump with the Crown Prince who will host Putin soon enough.  

Intellectual debates on liberalism usually do not allow for the possibility that there may be variants of liberalism that not only predate Western versions but may actually be even more liberal than the supposed blueprints that were developed in Europe.

Fuck isms. Get rich doing sensible things.  

Western democracies still seem to see themselves as an elitist club, to which Southern countries will seldom be good enough to be welcomed into.

But those Western democracies need more and more dusky folk to keep their economies ticking over.  

Akin to the refusal of the Pandavas and the elders to recognise Karn for his own merit and achievements, the West seems too ready to put democracies in the Global South back into the box that they expect them to sit in.

So what? Their power has declined steeply and will decline yet more steeply.  

This type of behaviour leads to a double whammy.

First and foremost, it is unfair to democracies – old and new – in the Global South. Second, it also does a disservice to the Global North by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: democracies that are repeatedly put in camps with authoritarian states are then tempted to indeed align/realign with non-democracies (which sometimes give them an easier time on norms and also sweeten their interactions via seemingly generous terms of investment, infrastructure support and more). Just as the exclusionary behaviour of the Pandavas cemented the alliance between Duryodhan and Karn, Western powers risk driving democracies in the Global South into the arms of non-democracies and authoritarian states.

This is foolish. Duryodhana picked a tough guy for his team. The West used to have a team but they fucked up by doing stupid shit- e.g. war on terror. Everything is transactional.  

The persistent attractiveness of BRICS for India today, despite its concerns about China’s adventurism in its neighbourhood, is an illustration of this;

BRICS now looks like shit. Either India does something with Quad, G20 and an alternative to 'Belt and Road' or it puts pressure on the Chinese on the border till Xi stops being so silly. In any case, China will soon be sucking in so many immigrants that it will face the same problem as the West. 

another was India’s reluctance to criticise the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thereby ending up once again in the same corner as China.

Which is where it belongs. It is obvious that India's only problem with China arises from the Chinese fear that India will act opportunistically, in alliance with the West, against its soft-underbelly.          =  

Global governance institutions need a major update of their structures and processes to be both inclusive and effective;

They need to be defunded and disintermediated- unless that has already happened 

Western democracies need a serious reconsideration of the values that they claim to uphold,

Also the need to seriously reconsider their choice of safety school. Seriously. Howgwarts isn't a real University.  

and how these values are defined.

Don't define your values in terms of how many ounces of cocaine you'd trade them for.  

Democratic and pluralist polities (some with ancient traditions of argumentation and collective deliberation) from the Global South need to be treated with respect and as equals.

Biden must stop using the King of Nigeria as a footstool. Also, stuffing the Thanksgiving Turkey has nothing to do with shoving stuff up Erdogan's bum.  

Without this, there is a real risk that like-minded friends from the Global South will end up on the side of authoritarian strongmen, to the detriment of themselves as well as the liberal democracies of the Global North.

Global South must end up on the side of weak shitheads without any fucking authority. Meanwhile the Global North is probably going to turn against immigration. An ageing population is an increasingly illiberal population. Come to think of it, the immigrants who come in to do the low paid jobs aren't liberal at all. They want their kids to have a strict upbringing and to rise in STEM subjects.