For the last few months, I have been teaching a weekly class on the Bhagavad Gita – one of the three foundational texts of Hinduism. Contrary to the Gita’s teaching to remain indifferent to the vagaries of the world, I was caught up in the hype and controversy that accompanied the release of the much-awaited Christopher Nolan movie The Odyssey.
The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, who spends ten years trying to return home after the Trojan War. Along the way he encounters monsters, storms, seductive temptations, hostile gods, and constant danger. He survives not because he is the strongest warrior but because he is intelligent, resourceful, patient, and adaptable. Back in Ithaca, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus struggle to preserve their home from men seeking to seize his kingdom. When Odysseus finally returns in disguise, he uses strategy rather than brute force to reclaim his household. At its heart, the Odyssey is about resilience, the longing for home, and the preservation of one’s humanity in the face of prolonged hardship.
The Bhagavad Gita, or the Gita, is a philosophical dialogue set on the battlefield of the Mahābhārata, the longest epic poem in the world. The Mahābhārata is the story of a dynastic struggle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, whose rivalry over justice, power, loyalty, and inheritance culminates in the devastating Kurukṣetra war, leaving nearly an entire generation destroyed. Interwoven with this narrative are profound explorations of ethics, politics, human psychology, and spiritual inquiry—including the Bhagavad Gita—making the epic less a tale of heroes and villains than a meditation on the complexity and consequences of human choice.
As two armies prepare for war, the warrior Arjuna is overwhelmed by the prospect of fighting his own relatives, teachers, and friends. His charioteer, Krishna, responds by exploring profound questions about the nature of the self, action, duty, knowledge, devotion, and inner freedom. Rather than teaching Arjuna how to win the battle, Krishna teaches him how to act with clarity, self-mastery, and equanimity without becoming enslaved by fear, desire, or attachment to outcomes. At its heart, the Bhagavad Gita is a guide to discovering an inner stability that enables a person to face life’s inevitable conflicts with wisdom and composure.
For years I believed that the Gita offered the ideal guide to navigating a VUCA world—one marked by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Then I read the Odyssey more carefully. It unsettled one of my assumptions. Success in the VUCA environment often depends on qualities that Homer admired and Odysseus embodied: adaptability, strategic thinking, emotional resilience, persuasive communication, creativity under pressure, and willingness to revise plans. These are precisely the qualities that executives, military commanders, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and scientists require today. In this sense, Odysseus feels remarkably contemporary.
Today’s environment resembles the Odyssey in one crucial respect: it is populated by intelligent agents with competing interests. Governments, corporations, AI systems, cybercriminals, markets, and social media algorithms all adapt. Success therefore requires what the Greeks called mētis—resourceful, strategic intelligence. In such environments, success depends not only on one’s inner state but also on accurately modelling other people’s intentions and responding strategically.
Odysseus is constantly doing that. He asks: What does the other side know, what are they likely to do next, how can I exploit uncertainty, when should I reveal my intentions, when should I conceal them?
These are strategic questions. At its heart, the Odyssey is about external navigation.
The Gita rarely frames problems that way. It assumes that the central struggle is within the individual rather than between competing intelligent agents. The Bhagavad Gita is arguably one of history’s greatest works on internal navigation. It addresses questions such as: How do I remain steady under uncertainty, how do I avoid being overwhelmed by fear, grief, or success, how do I act without becoming psychologically captive to outcomes?
Those are timeless questions, and they are highly relevant in a VUCA environment. What the Gita says much less about is: negotiating with hostile actors, managing alliances, gathering intelligence, deception and counter-deception, innovation under competitive pressure, organizational strategy, and statecraft.
Perhaps the Gita is necessary but not sufficient for navigating a VUCA world. On the other hand, a society composed entirely of Odysseuses would become one of manipulation and distrust. If everyone treats truth instrumentally and every interaction as a strategic game, institutions begin to erode. Trust—the invisible infrastructure of modern economies and democracies—depends on honesty and predictable norms.
There is another possibility that emerges from comparing these traditions.
Research on decision-making suggests that high-performing leaders need two complementary capacities:
- Cognitive flexibility—the ability to adapt, innovate, and think strategically.
- Emotional regulation—the ability to remain composed, resist impulsive reactions, and act according to longer-term goals.
Odysseus exemplifies the first. The Gita emphasizes the second. In particular, the Gita asks us to be like a sthithaprajna (“one of steady wisdom”) who is a person whose mind remains calm, clear, and balanced amid success and failure, pleasure and pain, praise and criticism. Rather than being controlled by changing external circumstances, such a person acts with self-mastery, inner freedom, and unwavering equanimity because their deepest sense of identity rests within rather than in the world around them.
The Odyssey is ultimately about recovering one’s humanity after war. The Bhagavad Gita is about recovering one’s capacity to act within war.
Those are fundamentally different narrative trajectories.
Odysseus has already fought the war. The question is: What has the war made of him? Can he become a husband, father, and king again? Arjuna stands at the threshold of war. His question is: How can I fight without being psychologically destroyed by the act of fighting?
Those are different existential problems.
The Odyssey is deeply concerned with home (nostos). Odysseus repeatedly rejects alternatives that would make him more than human. He refuses immortality with Calypso. He longs not for glory but for Ithaca, Penelope, and Telemachus. His greatness lies partly in choosing a finite human life over an eternal but detached existence.
The Gita moves in a different direction. Arjuna begins overwhelmed by grief and moral conflict. Krishna’s teaching enables him to resume his role as a warrior. The text concludes with Arjuna saying that his confusion has ended and that he will act. Arjuna returns as a transformed warrior—one whose action is no longer driven by attachment, fear, or personal ambition. Whether readers find that transformation convincing is another matter.
This difference reveals something interesting about the two civilizations.
For Homer, the highest achievement is not victory at Troy. Troy is over before the Odyssey begins. The real achievement is becoming fully human again after extraordinary violence.
For the Gita, the highest achievement is not returning home but attaining inner freedom while fulfilling one’s role in the world, however difficult that role may be.
That distinction resonates with modern concerns. Since the twentieth century, much literature on war—from the First World War memoirs to contemporary studies of veterans—has focused on reintegration rather than battlefield heroism. In that respect, the Odyssey often feels unexpectedly contemporary.
One should not conclude that the Gita is indifferent to humanity. Its central concern is the transformation of consciousness, not the celebration of warfare. Conversely, the Odyssey is not free of violence; its ending culminates in Odysseus’ ruthless slaughter of the suitors and the execution of disloyal servants. Homer does not present a purely humanistic hero in the modern sense.
The Gita asks, “How can one act rightly in the midst of conflict?” The Odyssey asks, “How can one become fully human again after conflict?” The first is a philosophy of action; the second is a philosophy of return.
Modern life has, in some respects, made us more Homeric. We spend much of our lives trying to build or preserve an external home: careers, relationships, communities, and places that give our lives continuity and meaning.
At the same time, it has also made the Gita’s insight more relevant. Global mobility, migration, remote work, retirement, illness, and rapid technological change mean that external anchors can disappear. If one’s sense of home depends entirely on external circumstances, life becomes precarious.
The Odyssey reminds us that human beings need belonging. The Gita reminds us that belonging cannot rest entirely on circumstances. Arjuna is not instructed to stop loving his family; he is challenged to see that his deepest identity is not exhausted by those relationships. Similarly, the Odyssey does not suggest that inner life is irrelevant—Odysseus survives because of extraordinary self-control, patience, and emotional discipline.
The Odyssey locates fulfillment primarily in the restoration of one’s place in the human world.
The Bhagavad Gita locates fulfillment primarily in the discovery of an unshakable inner ground from which one engages the world.
Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home. Krishna tells Arjuna that the journey home is measured not in miles but in consciousness. The enduring appeal of these two epics may lie in the fact that human beings seem to need both kinds of home: one we can return to at the end of the day, and one that remains with us when every external home is lost.
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