Jealousy & Envy - 2

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Let us now come to our own Puranas:

Ramayan first:

Let us leave Kaikeyi out...she sadly was influenced by her fond ministress in the wrong direction.

Shurpanakha was certainly smitten with jealousy towards Sita. And that led to the death of her dear brother, lamented by all Sri Lankans even now.

Mahabharata is based on jealousies. There wouldn't be a Mahabharata if there were no jealousy in mankind.

Duryodhan was surely jealous of Pandavas as is well documented...he was bullied by Bhim in his school years.

This is called jealousy between paternal cousins...jnatis, sagotris, swajanas, దాయాదులు...

Again, Karna is an exception...he is neither here nor there...like the bat is neither a flying animal nor a toothy bird.

So he was the subject as well as the object of all jealousies.

There doesn't seem to be much of a jealousy among the Pandavas; nor among the Kauravas; between themselves. 

Bhim was not jealous of Arjun; nor Duhsasan of Duryodhan....no sibling jealousies there...amazing!

Yudhishtir was totally free from jealousy, or envy for that matter. So he is regarded by most Bengalis as the hero of Mahabharat. And Bengalis should know...they are three bags full of jealousies as a race....

And Bhagavata:

Hiranyakasipu was certainly jealous of Vishnu, as his only son Prahlad praised him constantly. My sympathies are entirely with the father. I too would be terribly jealous if my son constantly praised my enemies (fortunately I have none).

And Lord Krishna...

He was a mystery unto himself.

All gopikas ought to have been consumed by jealousy among themselves...each of them wanted Krishna exclusively for herself, as is natural with women.

So he gave each of them a photocopy (cc, bcc) of himself, multiplying as many times as the occasion needed. 

Radha was an exception...he gave her himself in his original 100% version...she was a no-nonsense customer.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa always called Radha as "Srimati", I know not why...and held her as the epitome of  the Bhakti Movement of Lord Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu:

"Vrindavan, the land of Radha Rani, the “City of Temples” has more than 5000 temples to showcase the pastimes of Radha and Krishna. The essence of Vrindavan was lost over time until the 16th century, when it was rediscovered by Chaitanya. In the year 1515, Chaitanya visited Vrindavan, with the purpose of locating the lost holy places associated with Lord Sri Krishna's transcendent pastimes. He wandered through the different sacred forests of Vrindavan in a spiritual trance of divine love. It was believed that by His divine spiritual power, he was able to locate all the important places of Krishna's pastimes in and around Vrindavan including the seven main temples or sapta devalay, which are worshiped by Vaishnavas in the Chaitanya tradition to this day.^[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitanya_Mahaprabhu

But Krishna couldn't deal with Satyabhama and Rukmini evenly likewise.

Satyabhama is said  to be terribly jealous of Rukmini but not the other way round... I doubt it...(my own wife, Rukmini, was nothing like that)....

But both of them were intensely jealous of Draupadi since Krishna gave her all those thousands of saris...

And then they complained to Krishna about this.

Then Krishna told both of them to go to Draupadi and comb her hair...one on each side by turns (left and right).

And when they did that they found to their consternation that each and every individual strand of hair started singing;

"Krishna, Krishna, Krishna..."

Their ear drums got punctured and they learned their lesson thereby.

We don't hear much of Jambavati. Maybe she was above these animal passions having been born unto a Himalayan Bear...and known the futility of animal passions in humans.

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Let us now come to the human species (homo sapiens):

It is natural to expect the have-nots to be jealous of the haves.

But instances abound where it is the other way round:

Lord Churchill had everything...he came from a Royal Family (blue blood).  

Apparently an Indian Freedom Fighter wrote a letter to him in red ink saying he wrote it in his blood...and Churchill replied in blue ink saying he too did it in his blood :) 

But Churchill was incurably jealous of our Gandhiji. And called him derisively a "half-naked" fakir.

And when during the Bengal Famine he created someone told him that millions of Indians were dying of hunger, he asked:

"When is that fakir going to die?

...not knowing that that fakir thrived on hunger and hunger-strikes.

"In the book, 'Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II', written by Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill was quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/4/1/churchills-policies-to-blame-for-1943-bengal-famine-study#:~:text=In%20the%20book%2C%20Churchill's%20Secret,Mahatma%20Gandhi%20was%20still%20alive.

And our own Royal Gandhi is stricken blind with jealousy for our celebrated tea-seller.

In 1970, I was a poor bachelor in the lowest pay grade in IIT KGP smoking nonstop the equivalent of beedis (called Vazir fags) and not having even a PhD.

And there was this rich young married Professor in Mechanical Engineering who, according to my friend, once asked him:

"Why is your friend so happy?...He has nothing to be happy about!"

...he didn't know that I was learning basic physics; which he never could do even if he tried :)

And that friend of mine said the other day:

"There is no use of phone. Somebody should call. I am quite jealous  of our plumber. He gets at least 6 calls in the 15 minute duration that he spends in our house."

:)

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