YMMV / Bhagavad Gita

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Every single person has tried to interpret the Gita in their own lenses. See below.
• Applicability: The war has been interpreted as a battle between good and evil within the heart of man, most famously by Gandhi.
• Common Knowledge: The quote "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" is often interpreted by laypeople as a My God, What Have I Done? moment thanks to it becoming publicized by an interview with Robert Oppenheimer, who described how he thought about the passage while witnessing the Trinity atomic bomb test. Oppenheimer's Thousand-Yard Stare in the interview footage and the palpable regret in his voice led to people attributing those emotions to the line itself, when in actuality the quote, per Oppenheimer's own account in the same interview, is meant to be part of Krishna's attempts to help Arjuna accept the fact that he has to go to war.^note Likewise, Oppenheimer's own mental invocation of the quote was meant to say that he was metaphorically severing a limb to save the patient, as the Manhattan Project's failure would've led to an even deadlier ground invasion against Japan.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."^Explanation A liberally-translated quotation from Krishna that Robert Oppenheimer brought up while describing his and his coworkers' mortified reactions to the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project. Decades after the interview, Oppenheimer's version of the quote became a popular source of parody online thanks to its unconventional syntax, being used in image macros that attached the quote to tongue-in-cheek images of characters who try to look intimidating but instead look silly.
  • The typical person in India however is exposed to the Gita through the "Sambhavaami Yuge Yuge" ^Translation  I am reborn in every epoch phrase recited during the opening credits of B R Chopra's television adaptation.

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