I am Time.
Neither sorrow can slow my stride, nor happiness speed it up.
I flow, unstoppable, merciless, eternal.
Yet sometimes even I pause, caught in the web of fate, standing on the quiet banks of rivers that have witnessed too much blood and too many promises.
Today I stand on the bank of the Ganga once more, watching a story that began long before the war of Kurukshetra, long before the dice game, long before the tears of Draupadi.
This is no ordinary tale of a forgotten Indian battle.
This is the story of a rise and fall of a civilization.
Of light against darkness.
Of the battle every age must fight inside its own heart.
No one else can tell you this story.
Because I alone saw history unfold.
I am Duryodhana and I am Arjuna.
I am the battlefield of Kurukshetra itself.
I am the churning that separates nectar from poison.
As long as I exist, this great war will never end.
And I am endless.
So listen.
Listen carefully.
Because the present must prepare itself for the future by remembering what I am about to show you.
The story did not start when Krishna spoke the Gita to Arjuna.
It did not start when Draupadi laughed at a blind man slipping in her palace.
It began much, much earlier.
It began the day a victorious emperor rode back into Hastinapur beneath cheering crowds that shook the very sky.
"Long live the victorious Emperor! Long live the victorious Emperor!"
King Bharat, son of Dushyant and Shakuntala, had returned from battle.
His lands now stretched from the eternal snows of the Himalayas to the endless oceans of the south.
An entire nation was named after him: Bhārat.
But Bharat's true greatness was not the land he conquered.
It was the single sentence he spoke from his golden throne that day, a sentence that would echo through centuries like a temple bell:
"The worth of a life lies in merit, not in birth."
For the first time in known history, a king declared that the crown would go not to blood, but to ability.
He looked at his nine sons, then at a quiet young man standing in the shadows: Abhimanyu, son of the sage Bharadwaj, and declared,
"I adopt this boy as my heir.
He shall rule after me."
The court gasped.
Queens wept.
Princes burned with rage.
Yet the bud of democracy had blossomed, if only briefly, in Bharat's court.
And I, Time, watched it bloom…
and watched it wither in the hands of later kings who chose birth over merit, who sacrificed tomorrow for the comfort of today.
That was the first seed of Kurukshetra.
Many generations later, another king of the same bloodline stood on the bank of the very river that flows behind me now.
He was hunting.
He was lonely.
And he was about to meet a woman who would change everything.
She appeared like moonlight on water.
"I am Shantanu," he said, bow still in hand.
"King of Hastinapur."
"I am Ganga," she answered, her eyes deeper than the river itself.
One sentence from her, and the mighty king forgot his kingdom, forgot his name, forgot the difference between drowning and flying.
"Marry me," he begged.
"I will," she said, "but on one condition.
You will never question anything I do.
The day you ask why, I will leave you forever."
A king swore an oath to a woman he had known for a heartbeat.
I have seen oceans of oaths sworn across centuries.
None was heavier than this one.
Years passed.
Eight times the palace rejoiced at the birth of a prince.
Eight times the queen walked to the river with the newborn in her arms.
Seven times she returned alone.
The king watched, speechless, bound by his promise, tears burning paths down royal cheeks while the river kept taking his sons.
Only on the eighth birth did the father in him finally overpower the king.
"NO! I can bear this no longer!"
He broke his oath.
And in that single moment of broken silence, the entire fate of Bharat's bloodline tilted.
She stopped.
Turned.
Smiled like winter.
"You have broken your promise, son of Arya.
Now I am free to leave…
and free to tell you the truth."
The woman in the river was no ordinary queen.
The eight children were no ordinary princes.
And the boy she still held in her arms?
He would one day stop the Ganga herself with a wall of arrows…
and then surrender his entire life with a single sentence that made even the gods weep and shout his new name in terror.
But that comes later.
For now, the king stands on the bank, watching the woman he loves walk back into the river with his last living son.
And I, Time, stand beside him, already knowing the cost that the world will pay for the promise he just broke.
To be continued…