Misplaced Tears and Rightly Placed Grief

 

Misplaced Tears and Rightly Placed Grief

Recently, a dear friend wrote to me after listening to a pravacana-kartā speak of Karṇa’s nobility at the moment of his death, as portrayed in Villibhāratham  that glorious Tamil re-telling of the Mahābhārata rooted in the genius of Śrī Villiputtur Āḻvār.

“His narration brought tears to my eyes,”
he said,
“aided by the vivid imagery of the movie and Śirkāzhi’s voice in the background.”

And honestly, who wouldn’t be moved?

Villibhāratham is a testament to the bhakti and genius of Sri Villiputtur Āḻvār. His imagination, while clearly a departure from Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata, is soaked in daivī sampat – divine qualities.

Take Karṇa.

In Vyāsa’s text, Karṇa is a deeply grey character – dazzling brilliance mixed with grievous and tragic blind spots. In Villibhāratham, those grey shades are deliberately “optimized”: his nobility is amplified, his conflicts softened, all to uplift the target audience and inculcate refined values.

This is not an accident. Mahātmas across time have done this. They take purāṇic and itihāsa characters and weave alternate narrative angles, not to “correct history,” but to stamp dharma more deeply into the listener’s mind (hence we have so many Rāmāyaṇas 😊).

Karṇa, in Villibhāratham, is one such embellished character – a conscious spiritual edit.

So my friend’s tears are quite appropriate, especially given the moving recounting by the pravacana-kartā. His tears are a tribute to the success of that spiritual storytelling.

And yet, something in me has begun to resist staying only at that level.

 

“Why weep for another?” – Rāma’s question to Bharata

When my friend shared how moved he felt, what rose in me was a slightly uncomfortable counter-mood:

“I’m trying to snap out of this emotional vikalpa nowadays. I’d rather spend my tears thinking of our plight,” I said.

By “our plight” I don’t mean our social or political condition. I mean the human condition – our bondage, our confusion, our endless tangles of attachment and sorrow.

In that moment, the line that flashed in my mind was from the Rāmāyaṇa, where Bhagavān Rāma tells Bharata (Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa, sarga 105):

ātmānam anuśoca tvam kim anyam anuśocasi |

“If you must grieve, grieve for yourself; why grieve for another?”

This is amazing in the context of the sarga, since Śrī Rāma Himself had fainted a few moments earlier when He heard that His father had passed away. He quickly recovered, and is now engaged in a deep dialogue with Bharata, who is adamant that Śrī Rāma return to Ayodhyā. Bharata is blaming himself and his mother for Rāma’s plight.

So when Śrī Rāma says, “Why grieve for another?” it may surprise us that He deliberately uses the word “other”. For Bharata, Śrī Rāma or his father Daśaratha are not mere “others” – they are his very life. And yet, Swami uses anyam.

On the surface, “another” may refer to Śrī Rāma and Daśaratha:

“Don’t drown in sorrow over Me or over Father; look to your own life and duty.”

But a śraddhālū, Vedāntic mindset quietly deepens it:

• ātmānam anuśoca – if you must feel shaken, let it be over your own ignorance of the Self.
• kim anyam anuśocasi – “another” (anyam) is not just Rāma or Daśaratha. It is everything we take as “other” – roles, relationships, stories, heroes, villains, even exquisitely reimagined Karṇas who live only in cinema and poetry.

That doesn’t mean, “Don’t feel.”

It means, “Don’t stop at feeling for others; turn that sensitivity inward.”

 

Gītā in one “made-up” śloka

My friend immediately asked, “Isn’t there a verse in the Gītā similar to this?”

There is in fact two that bookend the entire teaching.

At the beginning (2.11): aśocyān anvaśocas tvaṃ prajñā-vādāṃś ca bhāṣase

“You grieve for those who should not be grieved for, yet you speak words of wisdom.”

At the end (18.66): ahaṃ tvā sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣyayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ

“I will free you from all pāpa. Do not grieve.”

Here pāpa means, mildly put, the tendencies that take us away from eternal Truth.

If I had to compress the Gītā into a single “fusion verse,” it would be:

aśocyān anvaśocas tvaṃ prajñā-vādāṃś ca bhāṣase .
ahaṃ tvā sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣyayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ ||

Diagnosis and solution in one breath.

Diagnosis: “Your grief is misplaced. You’re talking like a jñānī, but feeling like a saṃsārī.”

Solution: “Surrender to Me / Truth. I will take care of the real problem – avidyā. Then there is no need for this saṃsāric grief.”

My friend added a lovely nuance: “Isn’t it ahaṃ tvām…? (i.e. nāan… unnai…), as if implying Swami is speaking to us?”

I replied in the affirmative and added my spin on it – that it’s more like tvam eva aham --> “you are I.”

At that point, it’s no longer a distant God consoling a broken devotee. It is the Self reassuring the mind: “You don’t have to carry this burden anymore.”

 

From dramatic tears to spiritual responsibility

So where does this leave something like Villibhāratham?

• On one side, we have Villiputtur Āḻvār’s compassion, reshaping Karṇa and others to awaken daivī saṃskāra in simple hearts. This is an immense service.
• On the other, if I keep crying only for Karṇa on screen or in a pravachana, and never for my own confusion, my own compulsions, my own bondage, then my grief is still “misplaced grief.”

This brought to my friend’s mind Śrī Gurunāthar’s words:

“Don’t carry your luggage on your head after boarding the train.”

Śrī Ramana Maharshi is also known to have used this same imagery.

Once you’ve stepped into the “train” of brahmavidyā, śāstra, sampradāya and Guru’s teaching, you don’t need to keep clutching the old weight of emotional projections. You can use them as pointers to turn the mind back to its source.

So these days, when a narration strives to bring tears to my eyes, whether Karṇa in Villibhāratham or some other poignant scene,  I’m trying to ask a quiet follow-up question inside: “What exactly am I tearing up for here? Their tragedy – or mine (i.e. my own unwillingness to wake up)? 😊”

If my tears become a doorway to that enquiry, then both Rāma’s counsel to Bharata and Kṛṣṇa’s assurance to Arjuna have done their work in me:

• ātmānam anuśoca – turn the spotlight inward.
• mā śucaḥ – and then, with understanding and surrender, let even that grief go.

That, to me, is the subtle journey from emotional vikalpa to spiritual responsibility –
from being moved by stories to being transformed through them.