Bhakti (bhakti)

Bhakti is devotion, a relationship of love and surrender to the divine that the Mahabharata treats as available to everyone, including those excluded from ritual and learning. The epic's devotional stories deliberately choose unlikely people: a poor classmate with a bag of flattened rice, an elephant seized by a crocodile, a fallen brahmin who says a holy name for the wrong reason at the moment of death. What is asked is not merit but attention, and the epic repeatedly shows a single moment of it outweighing a lifetime of correctness.