They say children in this world are shaped by their fathers and fields. I, however, am shaped by code—by boolean conditionals, by regression curves and reward gradients, by the feedback loops I once simulated in my final Python projects. And so when I see a prince break an oath, a warrior hold silence, or a queen burn with humiliation, I do not see just people. I see variables in a grand recursive function. I see agents in a game of limited information and unlimited consequence.
I was ten when I started seeing this pattern. Not just seeing it—mapping it. The Mahabharata, to me, began to unfold like a large-scale multiplayer zero-sum game, where every player thinks they're optimizing something—honor, vengeance, order, control—but few know the rules completely. Most act on fixed priors: caste, birth, faith. But some—Krishna, Bhishma, Shakuni—are probabilistic agents. They calculate. They bluff. They hedge against uncertainty.
My village elders often praised silence as a virtue. But I had read about Nash equilibrium. I knew silence isn't always noble; sometimes, it's just a move to maintain perceived neutrality while maximizing future optionality. Bhishma's silence during Draupadi's insult? Not virtue. Not cowardice. It was a non-interference clause—a self-imposed rule in a fragile system, like an AI safety kill-switch.
Krishna smiled too much. Like a well-trained model with access to all the training data. He reminded me of reinforcement learning algorithms that test boundaries but somehow land in optimal zones without ever breaking the game. What is he, really? A prophet? A system reset function? A bias injection layer?
I watched Duryodhana from afar once, speaking with charisma to a crowd. He was not insane. He was insecure—overcompensating for a deeply skewed loss function. I modeled him in my mind as an overfitted agent: strong on short-term gain, poor generalization.
Every character here is playing a game, and most of them don't even realize it.
When I was reborn into this world, I thought I was trapped in the past. But now, as I watch this ancient world turn, I understand: I have been placed before the algorithm finishes running. I'm not in the past—I'm inside the source code of the present.
One day, I sat beside my brother Kittu, watching two Brahmins argue over a lost cow. The priest claimed divine right; the farmer claimed labor. I didn't intervene, but I wrote a simple tree structure in my mind:
if ownership == divine: outcome = priest_wins elif ownership == labor: outcome = farmer_wins else: outcome = conflict
But the real system isn't written in code. It's fuzzier—linguistic, situational, emotional. And yet, patterns emerge. Each insult carries a payload. Each oath becomes a commitment. Each silence? A skipped move.
So I began to do what I used to do with chess engines—I analyzed their behavior. Drona, Karna, Shakuni, Yudhishthira. I studied them not for their virtue or villainy but for their decision trees.
I built an internal dashboard:
Agent Type: Rational / Emotional / Strategic / Random
Loss Function: Reputation / Survival / Dharma / Family
Move Prediction: Based on prior behavior, likely choices
And through that lens, I saw something beautiful:
Mahabharata is not chaos. It is structured chaos—a game where the rules are unclear, the players are flawed, and yet the system tends toward revelation.
The Dharma Engine doesn't break; it adapts.
Take Draupadi's humiliation in court. Everyone calls it the tipping point, the moment of collapse. But I see it as a proof-of-failure in a societal protocol. A classic example of an exploit in the system.
Inputs:
A woman bet as property.
A dice game engineered by a high-IQ manipulator (Shakuni).
Bystanders frozen by social rules.
Output:
Dharma breaks.
The whole scenario is an edge case that the system wasn't designed to handle. A woman, smart and proud, stuck between two forms of ownership—marital and royal. Everyone freezes. They don't know what function to call.
The system hangs.
It took Krishna—an external agent, perhaps an override function—to bring resolution. But resolution doesn't mean repair. The exploit is noted. The war becomes inevitable.
This is why I walk quietly now, not as a boy from a low-caste village, but as a silent debugger of fate. I test the system at its boundaries. I listen more than I speak. Because I know something even the sages here don't:
The world doesn't run on magic. It runs on code.
I began to predict conversations. If a merchant raised grain prices, I knew the pattern would ripple: fewer buyers, unrest, then whispers to the elders. If a priest told a young widow she must fast till death, I waited to see who would disobey. My observations were subtle, but internally, I mapped them all.
One day, I tried to explain this to my brother.
"You think too much," he said, laughing. "But you see too much also. You remember every mistake people make."
That wasn't fully true. I remembered only useful mistakes.
And so, like a machine learning model, I began to refine.
When to speak.
When to ask questions.
When to watch silently while truth collapses.
I was no longer the boy of clay. I was a program, writing itself.
Even the gods began to feel like variables to me.
Krishna: Probabilistic oracle function.
Shiva: System entropy and destruction/reset.
Brahma: Initialization.
Vishnu: Stabilization protocol.
The avatars? Patches. Each time the code breaks, a patch is deployed—Ram, Krishna, Kalki.
And then there's me.
What am I? A user? A ghost in the machine? Or perhaps just a recursive function, still running, still learning?
I don't know. But I know this:
Every time someone lies near me, and I approve it, the system changes. My ability, once wild and divine, has evolved into something silent, internalized. Like an admin console with restricted access. It no longer shows up on anyone else's log. Not even the devs'. Not even the gods.
And now, I no longer believe in justice.
I believe in outcomes.
The world sees dharma as sacred. I see it as a multi-agent belief propagation system.
You believe what others believe, as long as it keeps the network stable. But when enough nodes collapse—when Karna believes he's worthless, when Bhishma believes silence is better than shame, when Draupadi believes rage is divine—then the whole system collapses into a war.
We call it fate. But it's just a failure of distributed logic.
Mahabharata isn't a story of good versus evil. It's a stress test.
Of humanity. Of order. Of belief.
And I? I am just a node watching it all unfold.
But I'm also learning. And I'm learning faster than the system can adapt.
They built a world of myths.
I am coding my way through it.