Conqueror
Conqueror. That’s what I would one day call myself but first, I had to survive the version of me that had nearly given up.
There was a time when I couldn’t tell where one bad day ended and the next one began.
My desk had become a graveyard of half-read textbooks and unopened notes. Deadlines passed like strangers on a street I saw them coming, and I let them go. Every morning I told myself today will be different, and every night I stared at the ceiling, still wearing the same clothes, wondering where the hours had gone.
I thought about Arjuna the greatest archer of his age standing at the battlefield of Kurukshetra, bow in hand, and yet completely falling apart. He saw his cousins, his teachers, his family on the other side, and his hands trembled. He sat down in his chariot and refused to fight. The mightiest warrior of his time, undone not by an enemy’s sword, but by the chaos inside his own mind. If Arjuna could crumble, I told myself, then maybe my collapse wasn’t weakness. Maybe it was simply human.
It wasn’t just studying. My body had quietly stopped being mine. Sleep came too late and left too early. Meals were either forgotten or eaten out of guilt. I stopped going to the gym. Then I stopped going outside. Then I stopped answering messages from people who cared. The world kept moving at full speed while I stood in the middle of it, frozen not because I didn’t want to move, but because I genuinely didn’t know which direction was forward anymore.
Mentally, it was a fog so thick I’d stopped noticing it. I thought I was just lazy. I thought I just needed more willpower. I kept waiting for some perfect, calm version of myself to arrive and fix everything. He never showed up.
I thought about Yudhishthira a man of immense virtue and wisdom who still lost everything at a dice game. His kingdom. His brothers. His dignity. Not because he was foolish, but because he had lost sight of himself in a moment of weakness and pride. He sat in exile for thirteen years in the forest, stripped of everything he had built. And yet, he did not disappear into that shame. He used those years to study, to reflect, to grow quieter and stronger in ways a throne never could have taught him. Exile became education.
I was living my own forest years except mine was a cluttered room and a dimming phone screen.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. There was no sudden lightning bolt of motivation. It was just one quiet Tuesday evening sitting on the floor, back against the bed, surrounded by mess when I thought: I can’t keep waiting to feel ready.
So I grabbed a notebook. Not a planner. Not an app. Just a plain, cheap notebook.
I wrote down three words at the top of the first page: Where am I?
And for the first time in months, I answered honestly. Not the version I told people. The real one. I wrote about the skipped lectures, the physical exhaustion, the weeks I’d lost to scrolling and silence. I didn’t sugarcoat it. I just looked at it all of it without flinching.
Then I turned the page and wrote: What actually matters to me?
Not what should matter. Not what others expected. What I genuinely cared about, deep down, underneath all the noise. Slowly, answers surfaced. Small ones. Real ones.
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This is what Krishna gave Arjuna on that battlefield not a battle plan, but clarity. He didn’t hand Arjuna a list of enemies to defeat. He asked him to look inward first. Who are you? What is your dharma? What are you truly here to do? The Bhagavad Gita was not a war manual. It was a conversation between a broken man and his own deepest self. And it began only when Arjuna was honest enough to say: I don’t know what to do anymore. That honesty was the first act of courage before a single arrow was fired.
I started rebuilding from there not with a grand plan, but with one small decision at a time.
I picked one subject. Just one. And I opened the book.
I walked to the end of the street and back. That was the whole workout.
I slept at the same time two nights in a row.
None of it felt like progress at first. It felt embarrassingly small. But I remembered Eklavya the boy who had no guru, no royal training ground, no formal permission to become great. He built a clay statue of Dronacharya and taught himself in the forest, alone, through sheer devotion and daily discipline. No one was watching. No one was cheering. He simply showed up every single day and practiced. His greatness was built in silence, one arrow at a time.
Something subtle began to shift in me too like the difference between standing still and leaning forward. The motion was barely visible, but the direction had changed.
Weeks passed. The goals became clearer not bigger, just cleaner. Stripped of pressure and performance, they started to feel like mine again. Study sessions became something I chose rather than something chasing me. My body began to respond to sleep, to movement, to food that wasn’t eaten in shame. My mind, slowly, started to quiet.
Even Bhima the most physically powerful of the Pandavas had moments of exhaustion and recklessness during exile. But he never stopped. He trained in the forests, sought out masters, turned every hardship into fuel. He treated his body not as something to neglect or punish, but as a responsibility a weapon to be sharpened daily. I started to treat mine the same way.
I’m not fully rebuilt. Some days the fog still rolls in. Some mornings the desk still feels like a mountain.
But the Mahabharata never promised a smooth road. Every one of its greatest figures Arjuna, Yudhishthira, Bhima, Karna, even Krishna himself faced moments of doubt, failure, loss, and deep confusion. What separated them was not that they never fell. It was that they each, in their own time and way, chose to rise with purpose.
Karna, perhaps, understood this better than anyone. Born into uncertainty, denied recognition, rejected by the very institutions that should have welcomed him he still trained. He still showed up. He built himself from nothing, not because the world made it easy, but because his dharma demanded it. His story is not one of perfect victory. It is one of relentless self-definition in the face of everything that tried to define him otherwise.
I was done letting my circumstances define me.
A conqueror isn’t someone who never falls. A conqueror is someone who looks at the rubble, picks up one stone, and starts building again even when no one is watching.
That’s who I chose to become.
And just like Arjuna who rose from the floor of his chariot, picked up his Gandiva, and faced the battlefield with clear eyes I picked up my pen, opened my book, and faced mine.
