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The Great Epics
A sixteen-year-old knew how to enter the deadliest formation on the battlefield, but not how to leave it. He went in anyway.
He knew how to get in. He had never been told how to get out. He went in anyway, because the alternative was that nobody did.
The story of how Abhimanyu knew half of what he needed is one of the strangest things in the epic.
And it happens before he is born.
Arjuna was explaining the chakravyuha, the wheel formation, the hardest arrangement on a battlefield to break, to Subhadra, who was pregnant.
He described how to enter it. And somewhere in the middle of the explanation, Subhadra fell asleep, or stopped responding, and Arjuna stopped talking.
The child in the womb had been listening, and did not get the rest.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.