Bhagavad Gita

18 August 2016

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Robert Oppenheimer, widely known as ‘the father of the atomic bomb’ said these words around 20 years after the 2 nuclear weapons detonated over Japan.

Ah, it’s a powerful, evocative phrase alright, but one holding within a small mistranslation of a small section of the Bhagavad Gita. Nevertheless I’m allowing it; the man did translate it himself. From the Sanskrit.*

This evening I feel bad, something of a pale shadow of the man. Clearing some long grass in the Turner Estate’s Lower Field (despite knowing it’ll adversely affect the drainage) I disturbed a small frog.

Now it must be said, I carried on clearing the growth and disturbed another small frog. Then another. Three unique frogs, with one thing in common…

Today a human, the same human who’d previously allowed their lives to flourish undisturbed, arrived with a big chopper and casually destroyed their habitat.

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*The word is ‘shatterer’.