Skip to main content

King’s Dharma



“Treat me as it befits a king.”

   Alexander was amused by the demand from a vanquished king. Porus stood before him as a prisoner but with all the solemnity of a king still playing on his anguished visage. They peered into each other’s eyes. Alexander could easily gauge the depths of Porus’ mind. Real kings understand other real kings. Only those who are slaves at heart will demean real kings.

   Those other kings were not real kings. When he asked them to attend the meeting he had summoned in order to demand their allegiance to him and tokens of that allegiance, they came meekly. They were intimidated by his successes hitherto, the last being Gandhara. They were not kings at heart. They deserved what they got.

   Here was the real king.

   “How do you want to be treated?” Alexander had asked him with much amusement. Standing before him was a king who had refused to attend the meeting he had summoned. “Yes, I will meet you,” he had sent the message, “but as a king would meet another king, in the battlefield.”

   That was a royal answer and Alexander loved it. It would be a treacherous battle, Alexander knew. It was the rainy season and the river Jhelum was flooded. But floods won’t deter Alexander, he said to himself. Alexander had crossed many a flooded river before reaching the Punjab. His soldiers knew their job. They knew not only to kill the enemy but also to cross flooded rivers.

   Porus might have miscalculated, thought Alexander. He must have thought that Alexander the Macedonian would be drowned in the Jhelum along with his warriors. Ah, Porus, you don’t know Alexander. Alexander loves adventure. Alexander is not interested in mere conquests. Alexander is on a quest and questers always find their way.

   Those others who capitulated without a fight didn’t deserve to be kings. They got what they deserved: vassalage. You deserve royalty, Porus, royalty and nothing less.

   Porus, I will discuss this with you soon. What I think is that you are the philosopher-king that our Plato spoke of. Shall I assume that you learnt it from the Dharma of your sacred scriptures? Someone told me about Krishna and his Gita. Do your duty like a warrior. And you did it, Porus.

   I’m performing a duty too, Porus. It is a duty to my soul which is relentlessly hungry. It is not a hunger for power as people often think. It is a hunger for what lies beyond.

   “I’m returning your kingdom to you, Porus,” said Alexander. Porus peered once again into his rival’s eyes.

   “Trust me,” said Alexander. “You want to be treated as it befits a king and I am doing precisely that because you deserve it. What’s more, I’m adding a few more kingdoms to yours as I go on into the beyond.”

   Real kings have no enemies, Alexander mused to himself as he put the crown on Porus’ head. Real kings have only quests. Real kings have their Dharma.

PS. Where did Alexander’s quest take him after this? I wrote another story about that three years ago: And quiet flowed the Beas. What prompted this present story is the way politics is moving in India these days. Any perspicacious reader will understand that, I think.  

  

Comments

  1. wingsJune 20, 2018 at 10:44 PM

    Precisely, we don't have real kings these days. They deserve whatever blames they are getting. There is no Dharma, no quest and no idealism in the hearts of the slaves. Good read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. pushpendra dwivediJune 21, 2018 at 12:27 PM

    interesting historical summary

    ReplyDelete
  3. Murthy K v v sJune 21, 2018 at 5:46 PM

    Great story.Alexander inspired the western mind a lot in terms of conquering the world.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 21, 2018 at 6:42 PM

      He travelled with some writers too, it seems. Probably he was more than a mere conqueror though most people didn't understand/haven't understood that.

      Delete
  4. parwatisingariJune 22, 2018 at 11:19 AM

    Cantador the storyteller. I am moving to refresh myself on the quiet banks of Beas.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
8 comments
Read more