When a teacher demanded his most devoted student's thumb

A forest boy taught himself archery from a lump of clay. He had no teacher who would take him, so he shaped a statue of the one teacher he admired, bowed to it every day, and practised alone until his hands were better than any prince's. When that teacher finally found him and saw the skill, he did not bless the boy. He asked for the boy's right thumb as his fee — and the boy, without a flicker of resentment, cut it off and laid it at his feet.

We usually tell this story to talk about caste, or about a cruel guru. Both readings are fair, and both are also a little too easy, because they let us walk away thinking the problem was someone else's, long ago.

Look again and a quieter thing is sitting at the centre of it — not hatred, but partiality. The teacher did not despise the forest boy. He simply loved another student so completely that he could not bear to let anyone else stand taller. That is a far more ordinary failing than cruelty, and it is the one most of us carry without ever naming it.

The boy was Eklavya, son of a forest chief. The teacher was Drona, who trained the princes of Hastinapur. When Eklavya came to learn, Drona turned him away — he was not royal, and Drona's duty was to the palace. So Eklavya went home, built a clay likeness of Drona, and trained before it with such devotion that he surpassed everyone.

The trouble began the day the princes stumbled on him in the forest and saw him shoot. Arjuna, Drona's favourite, went straight to his teacher, stung: you told me you would make me the finest archer alive — then who is this boy who is already better than me?

There it is, the real hinge of the whole tale. Drona had made Arjuna a promise. Eklavya threatened that promise. And so the teacher walked into the forest and asked the one thing that would quietly remove the threat — the thumb that drew the bowstring. Notice what is missing from his motive: there is no hatred for Eklavya in it at all. There is only an overflowing love for Arjuna, and a promise that love refused to break, whatever the cost to a boy who had done nothing wrong.

We think of partiality as a mild thing, a soft word — playing favourites. But watch what it did here, and you see its real shape. Partiality is not the opposite of love. It is love with its evenness removed.

Drona's heart was not cold; it was warm, only it was warm in one direction. All of it pointed at Arjuna. And the moment love loses its balance, it stops being a blessing to everyone around it and becomes a kind of pressure — a force that lifts one person by quietly pressing everyone else down. From the inside, Drona felt only devotion to his student. From the outside, that same devotion landed on Eklavya as a maiming. The two were the same feeling, seen from two ends.

The Gita holds up the exact opposite as the mark of a wise person: 'vidya-vinaya-sampanne... panditah sama-darshinah' (5.18) — the truly learned look with an equal eye upon a scholar, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and an outcaste alike. Sama-darshi: even-sighted. Not loving no one, but loving without tilting. Drona had every gift a teacher could want except that one, and the lack of that one undid everything else.

Here is the part the moral lessons usually skip, and it is the sharpest part. The very thing that made Drona maim Eklavya — a bottomless, unbalanced attachment — was the exact thing his enemies used to kill him.

On the eighteenth day of the war, Drona was unstoppable; no warrior could match his bow. So Krishna found the soft spot — not in his skill, but in his love. Drona had one weakness larger than any: his son, Ashwatthama. The Pandavas killed an elephant that happened to share that name, and Bhima roared across the field, 'Ashwatthama is dead.' Drona could not believe it from anyone but the honest Yudhishthira. Yudhishthira said it — 'Ashwatthama is dead' — then added, almost inaudibly, 'the elephant,' as conch-shells drowned the rest. Drona heard only the first half. Grief emptied him. He laid down his bow, sat on the floor of his chariot, and Dhrishtadyumna stepped up and beheaded the unarmed old man.

Sit with the symmetry. He crippled a boy to protect a love he could not balance, and years later an unbalanced love left him defenceless. The blade of partiality, once drawn, does not stay pointed outward. It circles back to the hand that held it.

It is comfortable to file all this under 'ancient kings and gurus' and move on. But the gurukul has only changed its clothes. The same thing runs through an ordinary house and an ordinary office.

Think of the parent who, without ever meaning to, beams at one child and only corrects the other. The teacher who truly sees the front-bench star and lets the quiet one at the back stay invisible. The boss with a golden boy, around whom every good project somehow arranges itself. None of these people are villains. Like Drona, they mostly feel warmth, not malice — they are simply pouring it all one way.

And somewhere there is always an Eklavya, giving up a thumb without a word. Today the thumb is rarely a thumb. It is a child's confidence, slowly thinning. It is the colleague who stops raising her hand because she has learnt the room was never really listening. The cost is paid quietly, by the overlooked — and then, more slowly, by the one who plays favourites too, who ends up surrounded by people performing for his approval rather than telling him the truth. Both sides lose. That is the strange arithmetic of partiality: it looks like it benefits someone, and in the end it cheats everyone.

So what is the lesson here — that we should love no one too much, hold everyone at the same cool distance? No. That would just be indifference wearing wisdom's robe, and it would miss the whole point.

The lesson is subtler and harder. The problem was never that Drona loved Arjuna. The problem was that his love had a slope, and everything rolled downhill to one person. What the Gita calls sama-darshi is not a colder heart; it is a wider one — warmth that does not need to dim anyone in order to brighten someone else. You can pour yourself into your favourite student and still refuse to break a stranger's thumb. You can adore one child and still let the other feel fully seen. The two are not enemies; we only make them enemies when we let love tilt.

That is why this old story still matters, and why it is worth carrying out of the past and into your own kitchen and workplace. The next time you feel that warm rush toward the one who is easy to love — the bright one, the one who reflects you back — it is worth a quiet pause to ask: who, just then, am I not seeing? Whose thumb is quietly being asked for, while my heart is busy looking the other way?