A Completely Irrelevant History of Achilles’ Heel and Duryodhana’s Thigh…

As a child I heard the story of Duryodhana’s thigh, and as I grew older, Achilles and his association with the heel was something one read about and wondered. One tends to think very respectfully about folks after whom things are named.

But Achilles was different. And Duryodhana still needs to have a thigh muscle named after him, I should think.

Duryodhana , who can be described as a wild, wilful, brave, spoilt prince of the Kauravas , maybe found in the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Achiiles , it turns out , has a similar background, only it is based in the various Greek Islands, and his activities were chronicled by Homer (not Simpson) in the Iliad, which was probably written, as a way of remembering folks with all lenghty, unpronounceable, Greek names and their multifarious activities with and without Gods. Truly humbling, and my sympathies to all the Greek school children of those days who had to learn to spell.

Both Duryodhana and Achilles had births, which, would leave all the world’s doctors gaping in wonder, with their mouths ajar, almost permanently. In both cases, women were prominently involved in communicating with the then current Gods, and basically getting them to do what they wanted to do themselves.

The Mahabharata is all about the fight between the Kauravas and Pandavas, the former the evil, and the latter, well, not evil. The Kauravas were a hundred, the Pandavas, five. The Pandvas were born to Queen Kunti, in the usual way, except for one episode , where , unlike the female fratricide practiced today, Kunti let go , one of her sons, into a basket in the river, as the child was not fathered by her royal husband, but by the Sun God. (Where was the husband when all this was happeneing ?)

The Kaurava “s King Dhrutarashtra was blind, and his queen Gandhari was in competetion with Queen Kunti . Frustrated about not delivering before Kunti, she beat her womb , and really messed up her delivery ; what emerged was a hard grey mass. Well, excessive prayers to various sages, resulted in the mass being broken up into a hundred pieces, each being buried in a pot of clarified butter or ghee, for a year, after which , someone cracked the pots open, and a hundred sons emerged from them, the eldest being Duryodhana.

Well, a year and nine months of development , in such a high cholesterol, high fat environment,certainly made Duryodhana a strong child. He was also a thoughtless, yet scheming, disrespectful, greedy person. Legend has it, that he was made up of thunder, and was very very strong. He spent his entire life, scheming, cheating, playing people off against each other, granting material favours to people he liked, and insulting and abusing the Pandavas, to the extent, that their wife Draupadi (five Pandavas had 1 wife, but that is another story), was dragged into his court and disrobed as part of his celebration of winning a bet against the Pandavas, as well as also to greviously insult them . He further sealed his own fate, and showed his lack of class, by slapping his thigh and inviting Draupadi to sit there.