In a hillside ashram, a boy named Nachiketa watched the priests prepare the morning fire-offering. They poured ghee into the flames, chanted, and scattered grains, and the whole hall filled with sweet smoke rising to the heavens.

Nachiketa felt small. He had no ghee to pour, no fire of his own. All he had was a worn palm-leaf manuscript, the sacred conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, which his teacher had let him borrow.

"I wish I could offer something to the Lord," he sighed to the old sage who tended the library.

The sage looked up from his reading. "And what do you do each evening, Nachiketa, when the others sleep?"

"I read this," said the boy, holding up the leaves. "The talk between Krishna and Arjuna. I read it slowly. I try to understand each line. Some nights I only get through one verse, but I turn it over and over until it shines."

The old sage smiled the way the sun smiles through morning mist.

"Then you are already making the highest offering," he said. "Listen. Krishna Himself said that whoever studies this sacred dialogue worships Him by the sacrifice of knowledge. Not with fire. Not with flowers. With understanding. When you read with a careful, loving mind, your thinking rises like that smoke you watched this morning — straight up to Him."

Nachiketa looked at the manuscript in his hands with new eyes. "So my reading is a kind of prayer?"

"The very dearest kind," said the sage. "Krishna called it His own settled view. The fire-offering needs ghee and grain, which the poor may not have. But the offering of knowledge needs only an open mind and a willing heart — and those, every child possesses."

That night Nachiketa lit no fire. He sat by a single lamp and read the sacred conversation, slowly, lovingly, one verse at a time. And as he read, he understood for the first time that he was not merely studying. He was worshipping — and the Lord, somewhere, was glad.