In today’s mini-episode, we’re meeting an avatar of Vishnu. Vishnu is the Preserver in the Holy Trinity. The others being Shiva the destroyer and Brahma the Creator, who’s also my dad.
The Asurs and Devs were two races at war with each other.
Emperor Bali of the Asurs, the grandson of Prahlad, had just defeated the Devs and he’d captured all three realms – the Earth, Heaven, and Hell.
Understandably the Devs who lived in Heaven were not very happy with this. So they appealed to Vishnu. Could he do something about reclaiming their homes from the invader?
Of course Vishnu could do something about it. He transformed into the guise of a rishi, and a particularly short one at that. He called himself Vaman.
Bali was busy offering prayers of thanks. It’s quite logical to ask whom exactly he was thanking given he had just conquered the Devs in heaven.
But his offerings were towards more abstract concepts. All of his ancestors, all visiting Rishis or holy men.
It was normal for some Rishis to ask for something specific if they didn’t like the generic goody bag handed out by the King at such events.
Vaman was one of those. He asked Bali for just enough land that he could cover in 3 steps.
This was a very typical request. Rishis would often ask for enough land for them to build a tiny little praying space, just large enough for a tiny fire and for them to sit in front of it.
Bali was about to give him the go-ahead, but just then Shukracharya stepped in.
We’ve met Shukracharya as Friday in “Episode 27 – The Rise of Shukra” and “Episode 28 – His Girl Friday”. Shukra or Friday was the Professor of the Asurs.
Friday had all kinds of superpowers, including the power to bring back the dead, something even the genie in Aladdin couldn’t do. Amongst other things, he could see through disguises. Just like Mad-Eye Moody from Harry Potter.
He saw that Vaman was more than he seemed.
He immediately warned Bali. But Bali wouldn’t listen.
He granted Vaman’s harmless request. But he wasn’t prepared for what was going to happen next. Vaman grew in size, just as if someone had cast an enlargement spell.
But this one worked faster than it did for his Unicorn Fish avatar. Within seconds, Vaman was so large he had occupied the entire world! He then took two more steps, one into Heaven another into Hell. Bali had been tricked into transferring the ownership of the Universe over to Vishnu, who promptly transferred it on to Indra, the chief of the Devs.
All this goes to show that if there’s one lesson to be learned here, it is that you really should not ignore your professor’s warnings.
This avatar is a little bit different from Vishnu’s other Avatars. Most of the other cases are rescue missions! Some like Ram and Krishna are incredibly complex avatars that helped achieve a lot in their lifetimes.
But Vaman’s entire purpose is to restore the balance between the Asurs and the Devs. Narsimha, another avatar of Vishnu did kill an Asur emperor, Hiranyakashapu, but he left Prahlad, another Asur, in charge.
That’s all for this mini-episode.
Next time
In this weekend’s full episode we’ll go back to Akbar and Birbal!
We’ve previously seen Birbal in his Sherlock Holmes persona. This time, he’s going to pull a magic trick that David Copperfield would have been proud of.