How did this happen ...

 

How did this happen ...

We have heard that Lord Rama launched his arrow that pierced through the trunks of seven trees and felled Vali. There is a hint of the same here. It is said that and taking the meaning of the Sanskrit word Ajanabahu as one whose middle finger reaches beyond his knees, (mine is a couple of inches short of the knee cap, though my parents named me Raghuram!).

I as an engineer and I study this particular piece of information in the context of my profession. In my opinion, this is one of the points where the epic gets interesting and takes an unexpected turn ... it raises a number of questions in philosophy, and morality too!

To my credit – yes, I am tooting my own horn – I have mentioned this in my lectures to first year engineering students around a context that I had built.

How does the arrow reach Vali?

 I claim that the long arms of Lord Rama pulled the string of the bow (along with the back end of the arrow) far back enough to give the arrow sufficient kinetic energy to penetrate through the tree trunks AND still kill Vali (the version I heard at the knees of mother's eldest sister)! This is a simple matter of creating a high enough potential energy in the string by lengthening it – when the string is pulled backwards – and releasing the arrow, transferring the potential energy in the string to kinetic energy of the arrow.

Neat, ain’t it?

I do not recall whether I have shared this line of thinking to other faculty members who teach the same course. But, I am going to share it with them and I am reasonably sure that anything coming from me would be thrown into what is called, in Microsoft suite, “Recycle Bin” and then removed from there too!

In the above Lord Rama retained all his powers, the narrators added a particular detail much earlier that justifies what comes much later (during the final year of the Vanvas), the teachers remained oblivious of an interesting item of learning in a particular topic; yet, students lost bigly!

How was the above, not taking a factotum readily available in our literature – missed being mentioned as a conceptual explanation in class, as a teaching aid?

Only the faculty members can know how they let this happen. They were not learning outside of the text books, simple.

That is sad.

Raghuram Ekambaram