Answer:

Such a question has no simple answer. As the Bhagavad Gita itself acknowledges, gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ—the workings of karma are profound and difficult to understand.

Having said that, it is helpful to distinguish between making sense of what has happened and making sense in what has happened. The first seeks to understand why an event occurred. The second seeks to determine how we should respond now that the event has occurred. While the Bhagavad Gita does offer perspectives on the first question, its primary focus is the second.

When Arjuna is overwhelmed by the prospect of fighting against his relatives, especially his revered elders, Bhishma and Drona, Krishna does not spend time explaining how Arjuna came to face such a painful situation. Instead, He directs Arjuna toward the wisest course of action in the situation before him. The Gita’s primary purpose is not to satisfy our curiosity about the past. Rather, it is to guide wise action in the present.

This practical orientation is especially helpful when considering the relationship between fate and free will. Rather than engaging in sterile debates about what was destined and what was not, the Gita encourages us to accept the past as the domain of destiny. Once an event has happened, it becomes the reality we must now live with. This is an existential perspective rather than a metaphysical claim.

This does not mean that people’s choices played no role in what happened, nor does it mean that questions about causation are meaningless. Rather, it means that once an event has occurred, we need to shift our attention from unresolvable speculation about the past to responsible action in the present.

How does this apply to Ketan’s murder?

For those who have lost a loved one in such a tragedy, questions like these arise naturally and painfully. Rather than dwelling on whether those who are no longer with us exercised good judgment, we can focus on how we ourselves can exercise good judgment now.

As part of that sound judgment, we first need to accept reality. That does not mean excusing wrongdoing or abandoning justice. It simply means that we stop warring with reality by resenting what has already occurred. Having stopped that futile war, we can shift our attention to a more constructive question: What should we do now?

The Gita itself illustrates this shift in focus in Krishna’s response to the unfair killing of Abhimanyu. Krishna does not encourage Arjuna to engage in an endless postmortem of the past, asking who among the Pandavas made a mistake or what could have been done differently. Instead, He helps Arjuna focus on what dharma requires now. The war had to continue for the establishment of justice. Accordingly, Arjuna resolved to make Jayadratha the target of the next day’s attack because Jayadratha had played a decisive role in trapping Abhimanyu and preventing the Pandavas from rescuing him. Arjuna’s response was not indiscriminate vengeance against everyone on the Kaurava side. It was a targeted pursuit of justice within the larger mission of restoring dharma.

Applying this principle to our own lives, we can avoid two extremes: being naïve and trusting everyone, or being cynical and suspecting everyone. We can give others the benefit of the doubt, but that does not mean ignoring red flags. We need to move forward by being both caring and careful.

To conclude, we cannot always make sense of the past, but we can do our best to make sense in the present. We cannot change the choices that have already been made, whether by us or by others, but we can ensure that the choices we make from this point onward are driven not by fear, regret, vengeance, or unresolvable speculation, but by wisdom, caution, and responsible action.

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04.17 The intricacies of action are very hard to understand. Therefore one should know properly what action is, what forbidden action is and what inaction is.