Once, Guru Dronacharya overheard Duryodhana accusing him of favouring Arjuna and ignoring the rest. To prove him wrong, Dronacharya placed a wooden bird on a branch and decided to put everyone through a simple test. He gathered all his subjects and asked them to strike the eye of the wooden bird. But before letting them set their arrows loose, he asked each one of them a question.
He first called and asked Yudhisthir, the eldest of the lot: ” What do you see there?” To which Yudhishthir replied, “I see a wooden bird, the branch and the tree, the leaves moving and other birds.”
Everyone else who followed also mentioned the same elements: tree, branch, bird, leaves etc. and Dronacharya asked them all to lay down their bow & arrow. When it was Arjuna’s turn, he confidently stated, “I can only see the eye of the bird.”
Dronacharya smiled because he had been proven right. Everyone else had set their eyes on everything but Arjuna had set his eyes on his goal, the eye of the bird.
The Mahabharata teaches us crucial life lessons that stay with us throughout, the above is an example of one of the most important lessons – we learn from it is that the best teachers are those that only nudge you towards the answer instead of telling you what to see.