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Many of us take a lot of pride in keeping our personal and professional lives apart. Somewhere along our lives, one path slips into the other. There have been instances of the most professional or private individuals who have exposed their inability to compartmentalize their lives clinically in an unpredictable way. This dimension of human psychology has been explored ever so well in the Mahabharata.
Dronacharya was the Raja Guru of the princes of Hastinapura. He had a son called Ashwatthama. The boy belonged to the same age group as the princes. Dronacharya, requested the king to grant him permission to allow his son to receive the lessons along with the royal students. He trained the Kuru princes in various military skills systematically. Though he taught his son with the same dedication, he ensured that he nor his son availed any royal favour during the course of learning.
Dronacharya was highly impressed by Ekalavya, the Nishada prince who mastered archery by mere observation of his classes. However, his pledge to Hastinapura’s hegemony made him claim the right thumb of the boy as his Guru Dakshina.
He told the Kuru princes to fight Drupada the king of Panchala as his Guru Dakshina in order to settle an old score with his erstwhile friend. He used his professional profit to salvage his ego. Once he regained his dignity, he returned the kingdom to the loser without much ado, only after taking a part of the latter’s land and bequeath it to his son. Later on, he even accepted Drupada’s son Dhristadyumna as his student. The Guru meticulously made it a point to keep his private and professional lives in different compartments.
In the war of Kurukshetra he fought valiantly for Hastinapura, although he personally did not subscribe to their values. Krishna found him invincible. Hence, he improvised a situation where he led Dronacharya to believe that his beloved son Ashwatthama was dead by making the ever-truthful Yudhishtira lie to him. On hearing this news, Dronacharya who took great pride in leading a principled life did not think twice about the job on hand and gave up his life by entering the stage of Samadhi.
Krishna pierced the chink in Dronacharya’s psyche and proved to the world that personal and professional aspects of a personality are but two dimensions of the same person.