What is Right and What is Wrong?– Article 6.

05 JUNE 2023

Examples from Mahabharat:

Krishna, with the people as the Super System for kings planted firmly in his mind, tries his best to avoid the Great War between Kauravas and Pandavas by becoming a messenger of peace from the Pandava side to the Kauravas. Such scenes are not uncommon even today in the world. Krishna pleaded with Dhritarashtra the king, to give just five villages, one for each of the five Pandavas, instead of the Pandava’s entire kingdom, in which case he would make sure that there was no war. War becomes inevitable as Duryodhan categorically says, in front of his father king that he will not give even one needle space for the evicted Pandavas. What happened to the Kashmiri Pandits in India when they were evicted lock, stock and barrel and uprooted from their own homes? What is right and what is wrong in this case? Have people as the focus, not any religion or clan and the answer is clear.

Now applying the criterion, we have evolved, you yourself can judge whether anything is right or wrong and need not listen to any propaganda.

During the Great War at Kurukshetra, during its entire period of 18 days, Krishna comes out with ideas to decrease the number of deaths on either side and bring the war to as quick an end as possible, not just having the only objective of winning the war for the Pandavas. He knows that many people would question and criticize the strategies and means and methods he used, but Krishna does not even think about what other people will say about what he does and how what others say will affect him, as ‘I’ was never ever the Super System of Krishna.

Krishna amply demonstrates the lesson to the world to be learnt from the great epic Mahabharat. Put concisely the lesson is this: Coming just before the current yug, Kali yug, Mahabharat shifts the emphasis from the Means to the End. Mahabharat says if the End is right, a slight deviation in the means is okay.

One more yug before, during Rama’s time, the other great epic of India, the Ramayan said that, if the means are right, the end will be right as right means will lead to right ends. May be that was a time the emphasis had to be laid on the right means. But Krishna, sending the message just before Kaliyuga started, says that, in Kaliyug if you follow the accepted ‘right means’ you may not get to the right end. There are no absolute right and wrong means, anymore; any deviation from what you think is the right means, if that deviation can help in giving unconditional (+) to the right Super System for the role you are in, is right. Any means, however much you think is the only right means, if that means giving minus to the Super System that is appropriate to the role you are in, is indeed wrong.

Conversely if the means you think is wrong gives (+) to the correct Super System for the role you are in, in fact that means is right. And if what you think is wrong means, if it gives minus to the appropriate Super System for the role you are in, is of course wrong.

In other words, Mahabharat says that there are no absolute right and wrong means but only absolute right and wrong ends in Kaliyug, the current times. Mahabharat takes significant effort to elucidate what is right and wrong ends. ‘I’ is invariably the wrong end and should never be the Super System, in any role whatsoever. Mahabharat describes the wrong super systems for the roles we are normally in. Mahabharat calls for having guts to do whatever it takes to give unconditional (+) to the correct Super System for the role we are in and calls the action we take to accomplish such an end as Dharma. Mahabharat calls giving minus to the correct Super System for the role we are in, by whatever ‘right’ means, as Adharma. I have not seen a clearer definition of what dharma is and adharma is ethical and unethical, right, and wrong in any other literature except Mahabharat- not even in the most elaborate literature on management ethics of modern and professional organizations.