Arjun was restless. He kept fidgeting and would stay still. He had a lot on his mind. It kept going back to the day that he realised that he was a son of a God! Not just any God, he was the son of Indra! The King of Gods. After the ancient 3, Indra was the most powerful God. He was childishly disappointed that he wasn’t the child of the ancient 3. The god of the gods. But he soon realised that the ancient 3 had never had any kids. It was the other gods who had kids on earth. And as a child of Indra, he was at a very peculiar situation. He was more talented than the other princes around him. They held him in a certain esteem. He was a warrior. A powerful one. He had the blood of the gods in him.
He smiled ruefully. The Gods! How enamoured he had been with them. Only later did he realise that they were the ancients, not Gods. The all powerful species that were godlike to the humans. They were the ones who gave us technology, weapons, architecture. Rather the humans copied their inventions. The greatest human scientists were their disciples, their followers.
He remembered the first time he had met one of the ancients. The God called Agni. He asked for Arjuns help to defeat the evil doers who were hiding in the forest. Together with Krishna, Arjun had gone in and killed all of them, inevitably setting fire to the whole forest. He remembered the clarity that came with the fight. It was messy work, the hacking and the slicing. But strangely exhilarating. His vision was clear despite the blood dripping off this face. The arrow lodging itself into an enemy’s eye, the spray of blood as he hacked a limb off an opponent, the sight of a disembowelled enemy, the focus that came with the fight, his limbs and mind working as one.
The ancient had been pleased and bestowed upon him his first weapon. The almighty Gandiva. His own father had wielded this weapon for a thousand years he was told. The ancients are immortals he realised. No wonder we consider them to be gods!
He was taught how to wield the weapon, which looked like a bow to the uninitiated, but was so much more! He was drawn to the technology of the ancients. It was nothing like he had seen before. The only parallels had been in history, the weapons of Ram or the bow of Parshuram. These were weapons that no mere mortal could handle. They needed an insane amount of training or the devastation that these could cause would annihilate the earth!
Arjun dutifully practiced the control of his weapon every day. He trained with it on the ground, on horseback and most importantly on chariot. He was also gifted the chariot by the ancient. A superbly built, light weight chariot, which had modifications that you could find anywhere else. Arjun dint know how to use half of them. The balance on the thing was amazing and it was practically indestructible.
His cousin Krishna chose a new weapon. The celestial disk ‘sudarshan chakra’. He was the reincarnation of the ancient 3, of Vishnu. He was one of them, not human. Hence did not need training with the weapon as he already knew how to use it.
Arjun loved the feel of the mighty gandiva in his hand. He felt invincible when he held it. He felt the raw power of the weapon. That is why he used it sparingly. Such power was not meant to be wielded by the mortals. It would corrupt him irreversibly if he gave in. And he knew first hand the corruption of power, the draw of it.
He stayed away from it.
