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Background
Weakness, and what pressure reveals rather than creates.
Characters in the Mahabharat are undone less by enemies than by a single soft place in themselves. Yudhishthira cannot refuse a game of dice. Karna cannot refuse a friend who was kind to him once. Bhishma cannot break a vow he made as a young man to a father who never asked for it.
The epic treats these not as flaws to be sneered at but as the ordinary shape of a person. What it examines is the moment when the weakness meets a situation built to exploit it — and whether the person has done the work beforehand to recognise it.