{"id":1301,"date":"2015-05-24T21:36:29","date_gmt":"2015-05-24T16:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2015-05-24T21:36:29","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T16:06:29","slug":"different-boons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2015\/05\/24\/different-boons\/","title":{"rendered":"Different Boons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last November, I started reading the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sacred-texts.com\/hin\/maha\/\">K M Ganguli translation of the Mahabharata<\/a> (the only English translation of the complete, unabridged Mahabharata\u00a0before\u00a0Bibek Debroy completed his translation). \u00a0Seven\u00a0months on, I&#8217;ve only\u00a0managed to finish the Bhishma Parva.\u00a0On the one hand this means that I&#8217;ve finished everything leading up to the war and ten days of the war itself. On the other hand there are twelve out of eighteen parvas to go. In all this while, I&#8217;ve read nothing else; and this month I finally decided to take a break from the Mahabharata just so that I could read\u00a0<em>Seveneves<\/em>,\u00a0<em>The House That BJ Built, <\/em>and\u00a0<em>Royal Wedding<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And since I&#8217;m taking this pause, I might as well use it to write about something I noticed in the first six parvas &#8211; that is, that the boons various characters receive from various gods and goddesses play out very differently.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Boons granted by\u00a0Shiva or\u00a0Brahma<\/strong>: Usually, these\u00a0boons are won by demons through severe austerity or devotion, after which Brahma or\u00a0Shiva rewards the petitioner with\u00a0an excellent boon. After that, the recipient of the boon uses it to terrorise the natural order, and finally Vishnu\u00a0(on in one case, Durga) has to step in and exploit a loophole in the boon to restore status quo. Examples: Ravana, Mahishasura, Bakasura, and so forth. The only exception I&#8217;ve seen to this pattern so far is Shiva&#8217;s boon to Amba that she will be transformed into Shikhandin in her next birth in order to slay Bhishma &#8211;\u00a0with this boon, there is no interference by Vishnu.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Boons granted by\u00a0Indra or Agni<\/strong>: Indra or Agni ask Arjuna to\u00a0go to war with somebody.\u00a0In Indra&#8217;s case, this is\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sacred-texts.com\/hin\/m03\/m03167.htm\">the Nivatakavacha asuras.<\/a>\u00a0In Agni&#8217;s case, Agni asks Arjuna to battle Indra himself, so that he can burn the Khandava forest without worrying about Indra&#8217;s rain putting\u00a0out his fires.\u00a0Once Arjuna has successfully won his battles,\u00a0these gods grant him weapons.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Boons granted by\u00a0Surya or Savitri<\/strong>: Somebody will ask for a boon. Savitri will say &#8220;No, I will not grant you\u00a0what you are asking for. But instead I will give you this. Accept it graciously.&#8221; What Savitri promises eventually takes place. And then, through a series of coincidences,\u00a0that will lead to what was originally asked for.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Boons granted by Shakti (Mahadevi or Durga)<\/strong>: These are straightforward. You ask for something. You get it. But perhaps you bring about the\u00a0dawn of Kalyug in the process.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I wonder\u00a0which of these story structures arose out of poetry, which out of allegory and metaphor, and which out of plain old sectarian &#8220;My god is better than yours&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last November, I started reading the\u00a0K M Ganguli translation of the Mahabharata (the only English translation of the complete, unabridged Mahabharata\u00a0before\u00a0Bibek Debroy completed his translation). \u00a0Seven\u00a0months on, I&#8217;ve only\u00a0managed to finish the Bhishma Parva.\u00a0On the one hand this means that I&#8217;ve finished everything leading up to the war and ten days of the war itself. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-movies-and-music","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-kZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1302,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}