Ajaya: Duryodhana's Mahabharata - Collector's Edition

by Anand Neelakantan

These were neither thinkers nor philosophers, but petty traders who sold their God for money. They stopped Vidhura and Karna from entering the sanctum sanctorum, saying they were Shudras. But having received their pieces of silver, they moved aside. They chanted mantras without knowing what they meant and invented extempore stories, attributing them to the Puranas to justify what they did. They were obsessed with ritual purity and their own superiority, yet the city and river was littered with filth. They thrived on death like vultures. They fattened themselves on the guilt of those who had lost their loved ones. They threw half-burned bodies into the Ganga to save firewood and maximize profit. Death was a thriving industry in the holiest city of India. No enemy of the country could have treated the holy river worse, even though its waters were sacred to all races and castes from the Himalayas to the southern seas. Yet they considered themselves pious and treated others with contempt.