The Divine Has An Address
Nowadays, some "well-meaning" persons are repeating the rhetoric that Sri Krishna's teachings are "universal" and so his connection to India is just cultural packaging we should look past.
They take Sri Krishna's wisdom, file off all the "cultural stuff," and present it as generic life advice. Marketable and inoffensive. Platitudes about duty and surrender that could have come from any self-help book.
Except Sri Krishna didn't deliver the Gita as a floating consciousness. He did it as Yaduvanshi - member of the Yadu clan. As Devakinandan - Devaki's son. As Dwarkanath - the one who chose Dwarka. Each name is a coordinate on the map.
Millions of people have walked the streets of Mathura for thousands of years carrying the same stories and feeling the same pull toward something larger than themselves. That is accumulated spiritual momentum that can't be ignored.
The divine chose Vrindavan's dust over Hollywood's hills. Yamuna's banks over the Nile. Kurukshetra's battlefield over the Steppes. This is the real context that they conveniently ignore for universality. And their definition of universality means that it could have happened anywhere.
Wrong.
Universality means it happened so completely somewhere that everywhere else can recognize itself in it. The Bhagavad Gita works in boardrooms in Tokyo and classrooms in São Paulo not because it's culturally neutral. It works because it's so deeply rooted in its own soil that it taps into something every culture understands—the moment when you have to choose between what's easy and what's right. Between comfort and calling.
When someone insists on separating Krishna from Bharat, ask them this - would they do the same with Jesus and Jerusalem? Buddha and Bihar? Muhammad and Mecca?
Of course not.
Because they understand, instinctively, that place matters, context matters, and the specific matters. But when it comes to Hindu wisdom, suddenly we're supposed to pretend geography is optional? That's not respect or acceptance of any sort. That's just appropriation wearing the mask of universality.
Krishna's teaching transcends borders precisely because it's so completely rooted in its own. Its specificity is the source of power. Kunjbihari. Mathuranatha. Navaneetha Chora. These aren't footnotes to be ignored but the reason the story still transforms people five thousand years later. The land shaped the avatar. The avatar shaped the land. They're inseparable.
So, my dear culture-appropriators, when you find something that changed your life - honor where it came from. Not because you have to, but because that's how respect actually works.
The divine doesn't need our permission to choose where to land but it does ask us to pay attention to where it chose.
