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Background
Parents, and the long shadow their wishes cast over their children.
Almost every catastrophe in the Mahabharat can be traced to a parent. Dhritarashtra cannot refuse his son. Gandhari blindfolds herself rather than see. Kunti abandons a child and keeps the secret for a lifetime. Shantanu's desire costs Bhishma everything.
The epic is unusually clear-eyed here: it does not present parents as villains, but as people whose love, unexamined, becomes the instrument of harm. What a parent wants for a child and what the child owes the world are not the same thing, and the gap between them drives much of the plot.
- Pitr-rina
- The debt owed to one's forebears — a real obligation in dharmic thought, and one the epic keeps testing.