"The Mahābhārata tells us how the great rishi Vasishtha, sorely distressed when he found that all his sons had been killed by his arch rival Vishvāmitra, wished to end his life. He tried various ways, but the elements always refused to cooperate; the sea or rivers into which he repeatedly hurled himself, bound with ropes or weighed with stones, stubbornly cast him back ashore. Thinking he was a ball of fire, the last river he plunged into ‘immediately flew in a hundred different directions, and has been known ever since by the name of the Shatadru, the river of a hundred courses’. Here again, the textual tradition is in accordance with what we find on the ground in the form of the Sutlej’s multiple channels."