“In other words, between justice and vengeance there lies a very small difference — and the name of that difference is Dharma.”
When a person feels injustice in some event, that event shakes his very being, and the whole world appears to him as his enemy. The greater the event that feels unjust, the more fiercely his heart resists it. In answer to that event he demands justice — and this is right; for in truth an injustice of any kind within a society is the destruction of a person's faith and trust.
Chapter 8 of 35 — 2 parts, 4 min in total.
The disrobing of Draupadi in the assembly hall is the epic's moral hinge. What makes it unbearable is not only the act but the silence of the room: Bhishma, Drona, Vidura, Dhritarashtra — men of standing who each had a reason to say nothing.
The Mahabharata is precise about the cost. The war eighteen years later is, in one reading, the bill for that afternoon. Injustice witnessed and unopposed does not stay where it happened.