Image Courtesy : James Jordan
After the Mahabharata war when Krishna went to meet Gandhari, in a fit of anger and despair over the death of all her sons she curses Krishna with the death of the entire Yadava race in the same manner. Krishna who had foreseen the future where the Yadavas would be torn by internal strife and conflict thanked Gandhari for solving his dilemma and accepts the curse as a blessing.
Some years later Krishna wants a son and therefore prays to Lord Shiva for a son exactly like him. He is blessed with Samba who would go on to be the cause of the destruction of the entire Yadava race, just like his father wanted him to be.
Samba was quite a naughty chap and one day he dressed up like a pregnant woman by hiding a pestle under woman’s clothes, to fool a few visiting sages. Some of his friends presented him to the wise men and asked them whether the baby yet to be born would be a boy or a girl. However, the wise sages seeing through this prank, pronounced a curse on them – “She will deliver a pestle which will be the ruin of your whole clan.”
Scared, when the boys and Samba approached the Yadava king Ugrasena, he ordered his servants to immediately destroy the pestle, powder it and cast the powder into the sea. However, as the old saying does, all curses of wise men often run their course
While the soldiers were crushing the pestle, they could not completely powder it and therefore threw aside one small piece of the same into the sea, which was swallowed by a fish. A hunter called Jara then found this fish, and upon finding the piece of iron inside it, he sharpened the piece and made an arrow out of it. One day when he was hunting, he mistook Krishna’s feet for those of a deer and shot him with that arrow.
The rest of the iron powder was washed ashore due to the tides of the sea and surrounded the entire coast of the Dwaraka region, home of the Yadava clan, with iron bamboos which sprouted from this powder.
Now the Yadavas were known to be very proud people and during the course of an argument, one of them uprooted one of these iron bamboos and beat another one to death. One thing led to another and soon the entire clan was fighting with each other using these bamboos, which finally resulted in all of them killing each other.
Thus, the curse of the wise men came true and the pestle did prove to be the cause of the end of the entire Yadava clan.
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This post has been written for the Picture Writing Challenge # 14 from the Cognitive Reflection blog. The prompt was to write a post using the above picture.
For whatever reason, the above picture reminded me of the iron bamboo shoots from the story above reaching out for the sky.
