Table of Contents
A. What is Subhadra Syndrome?
In Mahabharata, Subhadra, the wife of Arjuna complains to him that he gives her nothing. (Usual, isn’t it?)
So she demands that Arjun teaches her warfare. Arjuna tries to convince Subhadra “What will you do learning about war?” But Subhadra being Subhadra draws Arjuna with her feelings and convinces him(as if Arjuna had choices) to teach her warfare.
Finally, she also asked Arjuna to teach her the most critical strategy of Chakravyuh. Arjuna nonetheless starts teaching Subhadra about Chakravyuh, a war strategy that is even used in modern-day warfare to isolate and take out the enemy.
When what you are learning is not your passion and dire need, you consume only information, not knowledge.
Information exhausts the brain because energy is limited, so we feel sleepy while consuming information(typical to engineering college classes, where the jokers who have never written a single line of code blabbers Object Oriented Programming which they also call teaching).
So Subhadra sleeps and learns half.
Years later in the Mahabharata war, her son Abhimanyu, who was in her womb while Arjuna was teaching Chakravyuh, enters the Chakravyuh and gets killed, because his mother cared to learn half.
We live in an age of Subhadra Syndrome, and Subhadras defend themselves “at least she learned half so Abhimanyu could fight Kauravas,” not that “she learned half and so Abhimanyu died”.
I coined the term Subhadra Syndrome after working extensively with patients.
Subhadra Syndrome
Subhadra syndrome is the modern addiction to accumulating information and wanting to know everything, wanting to feel being an expert in everything, therefore ending up seeing half, learning half, understanding half and putting life in danger by feeling fulfilled with knowledge.
Listen half.
See half.
Understand half.
But convince yourself that you learned all.
In Hindi, we have proverbs such as “Adhjal gagri chalkat jaaye” and in Bengali “Olpobidda Bhoyonkori.” However, these proverbs only talk about the half knowledge, not the desire to know everything without the consciousness that no one can know anything that is not needed to solve life’s purpose of {survive, thrive, and reproduce}, and no one learns by reading or listening; people only learn from life, and then better contextualize that learning by the example from books and information.
Some examples of Subhadra Syndrome are
- Study guestbooks and become engineers.
- Reading market research and believing that he understands the market.
- Seeing a business deck to believe that he understands the business.
- Reading methods of how to raise funds in startup, and going all out in raising funds.
- Marrying without learning about intimacy.
B. Subhadrafied Health
One of the biggest casualties of the Subhadra syndrome is patients because healthcare deals with life. Life is complex. Very few in human history understood even their own life with any clarity. To believe that one will be able to understand life of the others in 2 minutes is the same as Subhadra’s belief that she can learn Chakravyuh only by listening to Arjuna.
Physical and Mental health are only small parts of life, which includes several other necessary dimensions such as environment, genetics, skills, society, economy, geography, family, livelihood, geopolitical changes, responsibilities, dependencies, lifestyle, aspirations, ambitions, limitations, beliefs, habits, and so on.
All of the above and more are correlated in a non-linear fashion, and all the factors together lead to the pathological state of the body. Because hundreds and thousands of factors together play a role in shaping the body’s pathology, it is impossible to even guess what factor might be behind certain pathological anomalies.
However, as we are living in a Subhadra Syndrome epidemic, neither patients nor clinicians want to know which factors are affecting the patient in what ways. They can simply read some parameters and interpret that the body is crazy and try to fix the body.
- See what parameters are out of range in a blood test and give medicine such as Thyronorm for TSH >10, Metformine for Hba1C > 6, and 10,000 IU VD doses when Vitamin D <20. Folic Acid supplements to pregnant mothers, even if they never had a skipped period.
Other Subhadra Syndrome usage are:- Giving Antibiotic in a Viral infection. But that’s one side.
On the other side, this is much more fun.
- Take paracetamol in Fever, (other half of Chakravyuh:- Paracetamol is Carcinogenic).
- Take antacid in Acidity(other half:- Antacid is renal toxic because they are protein pump inhibitors).
- Detection becomes diagnosis, symptoms become an illness, pathology becomes pathophysiology, Neuroticism becomes simply anxiety and Anxiolytics, Fatty liver becomes “aaj ke din sabka hai” (BC sab pahar se kudke marega to tum bhi maroge kya?)
And thus from one to another Subhadra Syndrome spread and got the normal of the day.
No need to heal and recover from illness. Take medicine and suppress and voila.
C. Outcome of Subhadra Syndrome
Unfortunately even today, only Abhimanyus and not the Subhadras pay the price for Subhadra Syndrome, and even today, the price is Abhimanyu’s life. Talk about heredity!
- Yes, it is very well possible that Mahabharata states it is Arjuna who elaborated the war narrative and not Subhadra who demands it.
Neurophysiology of Subhadra Syndrome
Now, let’s correlate with Neurophysiology.
- For any listener to acquire knowledge, he or she must be physiologically coupled with the teacher.
- When a teacher teaches, the brain wave of all the interested students become similar to that of the teacher, which also essentially couple their heart rate.
This is through mirror neuron which creates the foundation of human learning. Now, if a student has low relevance to the subject, the neural connectivity will be low. The same mirror neuron then prevents the teacher from teaching.
Hence knowledge delivery is always dependent on the neuroplasticity of the learner, not vice versa. Mahabharat being one of the epitome of a Moral, Ethical, and Neurological masterpiece, could have never proposed that Arjuna forced education on an uninterested Subhadra.
D. Conclusion
We often enter into the battles not knowing the full. Because the only place that you know the full (or to a larger degree) is the battle. Philosophically speaking, a man often enters into a battle because it is important.
So Abhimanyu in all the ages like Galvani or Galelio, or Socrates entered into their respective battles knowing fully well that they have to choose the battle and will not likely live to see the end.
Considering modern science knowledge of 10,000 hours, unless someone spends 10k hours mastering a skill and strategy, one is far away from excellence.
So if war strategy was important, Abhimanyu would have mastered the art by 16(Ref. Alexender accompanied Phillip in war from the age of 8, and mastered the war strategy from Phillip, arguably the best strategist of the pre-christ era).
So, Abhimanyu was not war-ready with strategy. He entered the war because he had to. That is precisely where all the Abhimanyus stand.
So:- Don’t acquire knowledge if you fall asleep. Don’t teach a student who falls asleep while learning. Don’t leave Abhimanyus without choices to enter a war without being battle-ready.
Bring in Norish tales and Tsan-Zhu, and dry drill a strategy with smaller battles before you take on the dragon.
Bravery appears good in tales but is never a replacement for battle-readiness. Battles are not learned in tales, and wars are not fought based on tale learning.
