surely good things will happen.
Trinity atomic bomb photo
from Los Alamos National Laboratory
I am an Old Guy and just because I know absolutely nothing about Sanskrit or the Baghavad Gita, I am impatient waiting for multisubj yb to get back to me and explain what the heck is going on here, so I will continue to bumble along cluelessly and irresponsibly.
In the West, these are almost the only two passages from Baghavad Gita with which anyone is in the slightest familiar. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist from the University of California at Berkeley appointed to lead the Anglo-American development of the atomic bomb, was a brilliant polymath and polyglot and had studied Sanskrit at Harvard. He recalled that these passages flew through his mind when he watched the first atomic bomb detonate in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945.
Oppenheimer was born and raised an American. Many of the key physicists who helped him design and build the bomb were European fugitives from the Nazis, and had worked feverishly to build the bomb before the Germans could build one. To their horror and dismay, Germany surrendered to the Allies and was out of the war, but now the bomb continued on its destructive destiny to be dropped on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August.
For what it's worth, now India and Pakistan are among the 20-odd nations who possess atomic bombs. It's a secret and nobody's supposed to know, but Israel has about 200 fission weapons.
Oppenheimer translated Sloka 32 as "Death," but other scholars believe the more accurate word is "Time."
On this site, you can hear the passages spoken in Sanskrit. Maybe multisubj yb can comment on how dependably we know how ancient Sanskrit was pronounced, and we'd appreciate just about any bit of commentary he can provide. He might start by telling us what the Devanagari alphabet/script is; I guess that's what I've filched in these images.
Until he gets back to us from India, we'll just keep blundering and careening through these ancient texts as best we can.
