Karna came into the world with kavach and kundal — divine armour and earrings fused to his body that made him invincible. Indra begged them away as charity, and Karna cut them off rather than refuse a request.
As an infant, Hanuman mistook the rising sun for a ripe mango and leapt into the sky to swallow it. Indra struck him down with a thunderbolt, injuring his jaw — the name Hanuman means "disfigured jaw".
When Vyasa dictated the Mahabharata, Ganesha agreed to scribe it only if the telling never paused. Mid-epic his pen broke, so he snapped off his own tusk and kept writing.
In the Samudra Manthan, devas and asuras used Mount Mandara as a churning rod and the serpent Vasuki as the rope to pull nectar of immortality from the ocean of milk. Poison surfaced first — Shiva drank it.
Asked what he could see, every prince described the tree, the sky, the crowd. Arjuna said he saw nothing but the eye of the revolving fish — and that focus won him Draupadi's hand.
Granted the boon of dying only when he willed it, Bhishma lay on a bed of arrows for 58 days after falling in battle, waiting for the sun to turn north before letting go.
The ten-headed king of Lanka was a master of the Vedas, an astrologer and a virtuoso of the veena. His ten heads are often read as the six shastras and four Vedas he had mastered.
