• avarajā — younger sister
  Literally 'born after'. Devakī invokes the natural protection an elder owes the younger. In dharma, the elder brother is duty-bound to shield the younger; she names that duty to call him back to it.
• dīnā — poor, miserable, low
  The signature word of bhakti's mood. The Lord is called dīna-bandhu, dīna-vatsala — friend of the wretched, affectionate to the lowly. To say 'dīnā' in earnest is already to call on Bhagavān.
• hata-sutā — whose sons have been killed
  A compound bristling with grief. The participle hata (killed) is stark; Devakī names her loss without softening. Real prayer does not pretty up its wound; it shows the wound to the Lord.
• mandāyāḥ — of (me) the unfortunate one
  Genitive, feminine — 'of the slow / luckless one.' She heaps self-effacement on self-effacement. In the Gauḍīya śikṣāṣṭaka mood, this is precisely how Caitanya Mahāprabhu approaches Kṛṣṇa: na dhanaṁ na janaṁ, asking nothing.
• caramām — the last (one)
  From the root √car — that which comes finally. This is the last child; after her, nothing. The word presses Kaṁsa with the finality of his cruelty: there will be no more after this one.

• Bhrigupati Pr SB 10-04-06 - 2016-08-10 Los Angeles
  His Grace Bhrigupati Prabhu· 2016-08-10· English
• Shubha Krishna Pr SB 10-04-06 - 2021-01-22 ISKCON Vrindavan
  His Grace Shubha Krishna Prabhu· 2021-01-22· English
• BKG SB 10-04-06-09 - Krishna all Pervasive never leaves Vrindavan - 2019-02-01 New Goloka
  His Holiness Bir Krishna Goswami· 2019-02-01· English
• LNS Hindi SB 10-04-06-07 - 2025-12-10 ISKCON Vrindavan
  His Holiness Lokanath Swami· 2025-12-10· Hindi
• PrahladAnS SB 10-04-06-13 - Are we devoted to Krishna or to our body - 2023-07-05 ISKCON Slovenia
  His Holiness Prahladananada Swami· 2023-07-05· English
• PrahladAnS SB 10-04-06-13 Slovenian Translation - Smo predani Kri%C5%A1ni ali lastnemu telesu - 2023-07-05 ISKCON Slovenia
  His Holiness Prahladananada Swami· 2023-07-05· Slovenian

• Notice today where you press a personal claim — 'I deserve this because I am your X' — and quietly hand that bargaining over to Kṛṣṇa instead.
• When grief tempts you to demand an outcome from someone, pause and ask whether you are pleading for the soul's good or for your own bodily comfort.
• Refuse to let family bonds become the final court of appeal; before sleep, offer one relationship — its hopes and losses — explicitly to Kṛṣṇa.

• Where in my life am I, like Devakī, pleading from a place of bodily attachment — invoking relationship and pity to hold on to a 'last child' I have not yet surrendered to Kṛṣṇa?
• What does it expose in me that I appeal to others' sentiment ('I am poor, I am your sister') rather than standing in vairāgya and trusting the Lord's arrangement for what is taken and what remains?

• Mistaking Devakī's plea as the Gītā's recommended response to loss — and thereby sanctifying our own bargaining and clinging as 'devotional emotion' instead of recognizing it as the residual ahaṅkāra the verse quietly displays.
• Reading 'give me this last child' as material compassion for a body, missing that real compassion is for the soul — and so spending our days protecting the bodies of those we love while neglecting their spiritual welfare.
• Using the language of helplessness ('dīnā', 'mandā') as a permanent identity rather than a temporary cry — letting 'I am poor and bereft' become an excuse to never cultivate tejas and stand up in one's sva-dharma.

• Devakī appeals to Kaṁsa as 'younger sister, bereft of all my children' — pleading from bodily relation rather than from her position as mother of the Lord. Where in your own life do you find yourself bargaining with material relationships for protection, instead of taking shelter in Kṛṣṇa? Push back if a partner says they would do the same in her place.
• The verse shows real, unhidden grief — not stoic detachment. Yet vairāgya is listed among the related values. Discuss with your partner: is Devakī's plea a failure of vairāgya, or is real vairāgya something other than emotional flatness? Try to actually disagree before you reconcile.
• Devakī calls herself mandā — wretched, unfortunate. From a modern psychological lens this looks like self-pity or low self-worth; from a Vaiṣṇava lens, anāhaṅkāra (freedom from false ego) involves a kind of dīna-bhāva (humble destitution). Where is the line between healthy humility and corrosive self-deprecation? Bring a concrete example from work or family.

Two students are paired. Student A plays a family member who has just been told by Student B (playing themselves) that a serious wrong has been done to them — a betrayal at work, a broken promise from a sibling, the loss of something precious. Student B must respond first 'as Devakī' — appealing to the wrongdoer through bodily/sentimental relationship ('I am your sister, please be kind'), and then a second time taking shelter in Kṛṣṇa — neither suppressing grief nor flattering the offender, but speaking from anāhaṅkāra and tejas. After both rounds, the pair discusses: which response felt more honest? Which actually protected the soul, not just the body? The teacher then asks the room: when is appealing to bodily relation appropriate, and when does it amount to forgetting Kṛṣṇa?

• Devakī sounds pathetic here — flattering the very man who murdered her babies. This is exactly the kind of feminine submissiveness modern readers find distasteful. Why hold this up as scripture?
  Read carefully — Devakī is not flattering Kaṁsa, she is buying time for the Lord's pastime to unfold. Śrīla Prabhupāda explains that great devotees act on the surface within the rules of bodily relation while internally dependent on Kṛṣṇa alone. Her dīna-bhāva is not weakness; it is the strategic humility of a devotee who knows the Lord, not the demon, decides outcomes. The Gītā (BG 5.18) teaches the paṇḍita sees with equal vision — Devakī's appeal is not capitulation, it is sva-dharma in an impossible moment. We confuse loud assertion with strength because our culture has lost the category of tejas that operates through humility.
• If Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Personality of Godhead and is right there in the womb, why does Devakī need to plead at all? The whole scene seems theatrical — manufactured suffering.
  Yes, it is līlā — but līlā is not fake. Kṛṣṇa allows His own dear devotees to enter situations of helplessness so that the world can witness what surrender looks like under pressure. If He simply annihilated Kaṁsa in act one, we would have a power-display, not a teaching. Devakī's plea instructs us: when you cannot see the Lord's hand, still act with dharma, still speak truthfully, still take shelter. The 'theater' is for our benefit, not His. This is also why we do not invent pastimes — the ones given are precisely calibrated to teach.

A beggar at the king's gate names her destitution not to shame the king but to make the gift possible. Devakī empties herself — younger sister, bereft, of small worth — so that the cruelty before her may, by contrast, become generosity. The Vaiṣṇavī's way is dīnatā: to grow small so Bhagavān's mercy may grow large.