From the obituary of slain LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran in The Economist, London:
“He was a shy, coddled child, the son of a land officer. His parents, both pious Hindus, were followers of Mahatma Gandhi and his doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence. But the books young Prabhakaran read, out on the veranda under the banana tree, were biographies of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. He treasured the Bhagavad Gita not for its spiritual riches but for the passage where Krishna told Arjuna that it was his duty to fight and kill even his relations. His great hero, “a beacon to me”, was not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose, who had tried to drive the British out of India with armed force.”
Link courtesy Nagarathna Sitaram
Read the full obit: Velupillai Prabhakaran
Also read: Bhagavad Gita as the national spiritual doctrine?
churumuri 
any great work of literature would inspire rich, complex and noble interpretations.
why should the bhagavad gita be an exception? the gita, which positively inspired gandhi and einstein and oppenheimer and countless less famous souls, continues to guide more than a billion believers to live virtuous lives across the globe.
a thoughtful audience may be expected to “construct” a meaning through a process of internal negotiation with the text, based on individuals’ own circumstances.
frederic bartlett’s classic work “remembering” may offer a classic explanation to understand prabhakaran’s use of the gita. bartlett inspired post-structuralists such as the late jacques derrida and stanley fish (alive and writing a column for the new york times) to recommend “deconstruction” as a method of textual analysis with a focus on the audience’s circumstances as opposed to any David Olsonian notion of solid text.
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What is the point of this article ?
Of course, Bhagavad Gita has many interpretations.
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Just shows how retarded Prabhakaran was from childhood.
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Many well known personalities who advocate violence take their inspiration from religious texts. What is the point that this article is trying to convey?
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Prabhakaran’s family constructed the biggest Shiv Temple of their city.
Interestingly, that great frothing-in-the-mouth super-ignoramus clown, Rajeev Srinivasan, keeps touting Prabhakaran as a “christist”(whatever that term means, another of clown Srinivasan’s sanitary emission). Hold your nose and check this vomit:
http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/05/atlanticist-disinformation-on.html
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The question is why The Economist wants to make a terrorist into a hero!
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