The Question Returns: Why Do We Choose This?
Centuries into the story of Dvaraka, as the immediate memory of Krishna had faded into legend, a crisis of will emerged that no external enemy could have created. A generation of young people, comfortable within the systems that had been built for them, began to ask: Why should we maintain these principles? Why should we bear the burden of deliberation when we could be more efficient? Why should we include everyone when we could move faster with fewer? Why should we honor dissent when we could simply decide?
This crisis was different from all the others Dvaraka had faced, because it came not from external challenge but from internal fatigue. The work of maintaining a city built on love and conscious choice is never finished. It requires something that cannot be manufactured: genuine commitment. And that commitment, like any genuine thing, must be chosen again and again, not inherited.
An elder named Sarva saw the danger and called a gathering. He did not argue against the young people's questions. Instead, he asked them to do something harder: to go live for six months in a neighboring city that had abandoned these principles generations before. The neighboring city was wealthy, efficient, and deeply unhappy. Its people moved quickly and accomplished much, but the accomplishment benefited few. Its systems worked smoothly, but only by excluding those who asked difficult questions. It was prosperous, but the prosperity was built on the normalized suffering of others.
When the young people returned, they were transformed. They had thought they knew what efficiency without ethics would look like; they had discovered it was far worse than they had imagined. They had thought comfort could substitute for meaning; they had found that a comfortable life without dignity or participation was a kind of living death. They had believed that shared decision-making was a luxury; they had learned it was the foundation of being fully human.
Sarva did not need to argue further. The young people had learned what every generation must learn: that the principles worth living for are not abstract ideals but the difference between a life that is merely lived and a life that is lived well. They understood that they had been given something precious—not because it had been given to them, but because they had chosen to claim it, to make it their own, to carry it forward.
This episode became known as the Return of Questions, and it was recorded in the Archive as one of Dvaraka's most important moments. Not because the city had answered the questions definitively, but because it had allowed them to emerge and had faced them honestly. A city that never questioned itself had begun to calcify; a city that questioned and recommitted itself continued to live.