The era of the Dwapara Yuga had drawn to its dramatic close following the Great War of Kurukshetra, leaving the world in a state of fragile peace under the stewardship of the Pandavas. When the five brothers and Draupadi eventually departed for the Himalayas to seek the heavenly realms, the responsibility of the entire world fell upon the shoulders of Parikshit, the son of Abhimanyu and grandson of Arjuna. Parikshit was no ordinary king; he was a miraculous survivor, having been saved in his mother Uttarā's womb by the intervention of Lord Krishna after the devastating strike of the Brahmastra. Under his reign, Hastinapur flourished once more, and the virtues of dharma were upheld with vigor. However, the cosmic wheel was turning, and the age of Kali, the personification of discord and spiritual decay, was waiting at the gates of the world to enter and establish its dominance.
One day, while hunting in the deep, verdant forests that surrounded the Kuru kingdom, King Parikshit found himself separated from his retinue. The sun was high and merciless, and the king was overtaken by a profound thirst and exhaustion that clouded his usually sharp judgment. Searching for water, he stumbled upon the quiet hermitage of the renowned Sage Samika. The sage was sitting in a state of deep samadhi, his consciousness completely withdrawn from the physical world as he meditated upon the ultimate reality. Parikshit, parched and weary, called out to the sage, asking for water and a place to rest. However, Samika, lost in his divine trance, remained as still as a stone statue, offering no response to the king’s pleas. In a moment of uncharacteristic frustration and pride, fueled by the encroaching influence of Kali Yuga, Parikshit looked around and saw a dead snake lying on the forest floor. He picked up the carcass with the tip of his bow and placed it around the neck of the silent sage, a silent mockery of the man's asceticism, before departing for his palace.
Not long after the king had left, Samika’s son, the young and temperamental Shringi, returned to the hermitage from his daily duties. When he saw the indignity that had been visited upon his father, his heart blazed with a righteous but impulsive fury. Shringi was a youth of great spiritual power, though he lacked the temperate wisdom of his father. Taking water from the river Kaushiki, he uttered a terrible curse: that the man who had placed the dead snake around his father's neck would be bitten by the great serpent king Takshaka on the seventh day from that moment, resulting in his certain death. When Sage Samika finally emerged from his meditation and learned of the curse, he was deeply saddened. He recognized that Parikshit was a great and virtuous king who had merely committed a single mistake under duress, and he lamented that the world would lose such a protector, but the words of a brahmana’s curse could never be retracted.
When King Parikshit returned to Hastinapur, his mind cleared, and he realized the gravity of the sin he had committed against the holy man. When the messengers from Sage Samika arrived to inform him of the curse, the king did not react with fear or anger. Instead, he accepted the news with a sense of profound relief, viewing it as a divine correction that would free him from his worldly attachments. He immediately decided to renounce his throne, appointing his young son Janamejaya as his successor. Seeking to spend his final seven days in spiritual pursuit, Parikshit retreated to the banks of the sacred Ganges. There, a great assembly of sages, celestial beings, and scholars gathered to witness the final days of the king. Among them appeared Shuka Deva, the teenage son of the sage Vyasa, who was a fully realized soul. Parikshit asked Shuka a single, vital question: what is the duty of a man who is about to die? In response, for the next seven days, Shuka Deva recited the Srimad Bhagavatam, the story of the incarnations of Vishnu, which granted the king the knowledge of the soul's immortality and freed him from the fear of physical death.