Gita 01.17 Don’t let minor grammatical disputes overshadow major narrational and philosophical thrust

Bhagavad gita 1.17 kashischa parameshwasaha that here they continue to describe sanjay is continuing to describe the warriors on the pandava side and how they and how they are blowing their conches to signify their readiness to fight the war so kashischa the king of kashi parameshwasaha the great archer shikhandi chamaharatha shikhandi is also a great warrior shikhandi's greatness was primarily in terms of the the divine blessing that he had by which he would play a crucial part he would be the lynchpin in the plan to to actually bring down bheeshma it was arjuna's arrows which played the which caused the major damage but shikhandi also played a role in that drishtadyumna viratasya then of course there are the two drishtadyumna is the person who is going to bring down drona that is the fate that's what is expected that is what is the higher powers involved in it viratasya virata is the king of viratdesh here we see the poetic nature of the description of the gita wherein it describes how there are multiple ways in which the same verse can be or same part of a verse can be written that satyaki who was undefeated or he was undefeatable or you could also say it can be satyaki who was chaap refers to a bow rajataha is decorated by satyaki who was decorated with a bow so at one level we can see both meanings are valid the important thing is not which meaning is valid but rather the important thing is whether the essential point is conveyed sometimes in debating over minor linguistic points you might miss major narrational or philosophical points so the very point of poetry is that poetry can be read in different ways that is the beauty of poetry poetry speaks to different people at different times in different ways even the same poet on reading one's own poetry at another time can get another meaning out of it now we could say this is possible for all written work it is possible even for prose also it is true our poetry is said to have much more literary ornaments that make this kind of this kind of work more easy to see so it is important for us to be careful to not let minor things distract us from major points so here the essential point is that actually both let the warriors on the Pandava side are competent and committed to fight for the Pandavas and they are ready that is the essential point and that point is being very well conveyed here by either reading so Satyaki is also one of the warriors and he is also going to blow his conch now the Bhagavad Gita mentions the conches of the main player that is Krishna and the Pandavas for the others it doesn't mention the name of their conch whenever any author writes a book whether it is fiction or whether it is history they have to choose, make a decision about how much detail to give in the book there is some level of detail that brings vividness and visual absorption or visual imagery to the narration but too much detail and the reader's brain can get swamped by it so there has to be the right balance that if you want to describe characters then describe those characters up to a particular point and build up, each character has to be built up and how much to go into which character that is also important decision the author has to make so the Pandavas are the main characters in the Mahabharata the Mahabharata is the story largely of the Pandavas in that light if we consider that the Pandavas are who readers will have identified with by now the Pandavas are the ones with whom the readers will want to will want to travel in the journey so visually imagining visualizing the Pandavas graphically will help us to connect with the story but our imagination can also get overload if we get too many deals to process so the other characters are there but other characters we can't really pay much attention to them so keeping that in mind here the stress is on the Pandavas and thus describing the other warriors the conscious are not described so all these are literary decisions that had to be taken even when a divinely revealed work is conveyed to the literary literary book to the literary creation now this way the Bhagavad Gita's narration is moving forwards and it's describing here the king of Kashi was not mentioned by Duryodhana when he was listing out the warriors on the Pandavas side but he is mentioned here by Sanjay when he is describing who were there on the opposite side who were fighting ready to fight who expressed their readiness by glowing their conscious obviously all the warriors did express their readiness but the stress was on describing who it is that are prominent and Sanjay reveals these particular warriors to be prominent by listing their names as included in the description of whose conscious were blown thank you.