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I have to say, my initial reaction to this story was, "How cruel to the poor bird"--before reading that it was clay. But it still strikes me as rather odd that a culture that has so many vegetarian people would even think of shooting an arrow at a bird. Kind of hurts my image of them as a gentle people.




The Mahabharata is a tale of fratricide and civil war on such a grand scale that, at least in South India, some devout Hindu familiies will not let it be read inside the home, preferring the Ramayana instead. Of course, the fact that the Ramayan isn't 100,000 verses long probably helps its case, too.