Bhagavatham Stories

The river that had nourished Dvaraka and brought it trade became, in a dry season, contested. Upstream, a neighboring kingdom built dams and irrigation systems that diverted water away from Dvaraka's fields and wells. What had been a natural abundance became scarce. The city faced a choice: respond with force, as neighboring kingdoms might do, or find another way.

The initial impulse toward confrontation was real—soldiers were readied, arguments were prepared, the rhetoric of righteous anger was mobilized. But the city's leaders paused and asked the question that had become their practice: "What does this crisis teach us about who we want to be?" The question shifted something. Rather than demand the restoration of the old water arrangement, they sent an embassy to the neighboring kingdom not with weapons but with a proposal: What if both cities cooperated to manage the watershed more equitably, ensuring that neither would be devastated if another drought came?

The neighboring kingdom, accustomed to relations based on power, was suspicious at first. But the Dvarakan envoys came not to demand but to offer partnership—engineers who could help design better irrigation systems, traders who could provide grain reserves if the neighboring kingdom's harvests suffered, scholars who could help them develop water-management practices that had been tested. The offer was genuine because Dvaraka's leaders understood something crucial: a neighboring city's scarcity was Dvaraka's scarcity too, eventually.

Over months of negotiation, a new arrangement emerged: shared responsibility for the river's management, with clear agreements about allocation, and a commitment that neither city would hoard water in abundance or exploit scarcity for advantage. It required trust, and trust required ongoing relationship, and ongoing relationship required that both sides remain committed to the principle that common good was achievable.

The dam remained, but it was managed differently. A joint council of water managers from both cities met regularly. In years of abundance, surplus was shared; in years of scarcity, burden was distributed equitably. Dvaraka's gesture of partnership, made from a position of genuine vulnerability, transformed what could have been an enemy into an ally. The city learned again that its greatest strength was not military might but the willingness to build relationships based on shared flourishing rather than domination.

Years later, when the next drought came, the neighboring kingdom's granaries were fuller than they would have been in isolation, and Dvaraka's wells were more secure because of the river-sharing agreement. Both cities benefited from the partnership, but more importantly, both cities had proven that a different way of relating was possible—that cities could negotiate from their own integrity rather than from fear, and that such negotiation, though slower, created bonds that force could never create. The river, flowing between two cities, had become a symbol not of division but of connection.