to-do lists the day before the long weekend after mid sem:
1.Finish assignments
2.Write lab reports
3.figure out transport phenomena
4.wash clothes
5.clean the room
the end result -high fever and in bed for all of the 5 days.Of course to do lists are always meant to be what they are-to do,so no complaints there.the end result of that viral fever was that i had to spend a lot of time in bed and often with a thermometer sticking out of my mouth.i even developed a strange affection to the Hicks Thermometer.what a poor life it must be leading,faithfully recording people’s temperature.when you have no work to do and are forced to stay in bed such thoughts crop up,after-all there is a limit to the maximum number of hours a person can sleep even with fever.i could have gone on and written a poem on that instrument after those fruitful ruminations,instead chose not to partly because i couldn’t think past farenheit101.
I have always realised that when you are sick you want to be next to people whom you love or if that’s not possible as in a hostel ,I tend to read books which I must have anyways read a hundred times .In my case that means the Mahabharata.I have always wondered about Karna -praised so much yet the epic versions I have read have never substantiated the proposed valor.That might be due to two reasons,one that Karna’s stories of prowess had been marginalised over the years as the ballads were passed down or as the epic suggests he was indeed the perennial underachiever.I have never harbored a soft corner for Karna as so many people do partly because of the taunt at Draupadi in the chapter of the vastra -abharana and also because I have always felt that his philosophy was flawed.It sometimes takes great courage to stand up to your friends than your enemies as Dumbledore puts it in Harry Potter and Karna clearly lacked that.Yet Karna was great in so many other ways-an altruist,always a radheya,unflinching loyalty,selfless and in every sense of the word a martyr.He was one of those heroes who are so often doomed from birth yet remembered over the ages.Abandoned by the mother when born,prince by birth yet eternally the charioteer’s son,cursed by the teacher,deprived of all the prestige and honors that he so richly deserved,his suicidal generosity towards indra,humiliated by draupadi and perennially put down by salya, Karna indeed fell as the greatest of all tragic heroes in the epic.if not for his valor Karna shall forever be remembered for such a cruel comeuppance that he so didn’t deserve-his is undoubtedly the most cruel tale in the great epic poignant with irony.its funny that it must take a viral fever for me to realise this!
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