धर्मक्षेत्रे कुरुक्षेत्रे समवेता युयुत्सवः।मामकाः पाण्डवाश्चैव किमकुर्वत सञ्जय॥
dharma-kṣetre kuru-kṣetre samavetā yuyutsavaḥmāmakāḥ pāṇḍavāścaiva kimakurvata sañjaya
Word by word
The verse says
Dhritarashtra said: On the field of dharma, at Kurukshetra, gathered and eager to fight - my men and the sons of Pandu - what did they do, Sanjaya?
In plain words
The Gita opens with a question from a blind king. Dhritarashtra cannot go to the battlefield. He can only sit at home and ask a messenger what is happening. So the whole book reaches us second-hand, as a report of a conversation.
One word gives him away. He says "my men and the sons of Pandu." Both sides are his family. The Pandavas are his nephews, raised in his own house. But he splits them in two, and keeps one half for himself. That small word "my" is the reason the armies are standing there at all.
He also calls the place a field of dharma - a field of what is right. He may mean it as a simple name. It reads as something sharper.
Where you've felt this · with money
Two brothers inherited their father's hardware shop and have run it together for ten years. One till, one bank account, one set of keys - nothing has ever been divided between them. Then one evening their mother hears the older one say "my side of the shop", meaning the shelves where he keeps the paint. Nobody argues, and nothing changes that night. But everyone at the table heard it, and everyone understood that a line had just been drawn.
Going deeper
Dhritarashtra's blindness is the first thing the book shows you, and it works on two levels at once. He cannot see the field. He also cannot see past the word "mine," which is the failure that put an army on that field. The Gita will spend seven hundred verses on that second kind of blindness, and this verse quietly plants it in the opening line.
The setting is doing work too. dharma-kṣetra - field of dharma - is the first compound in the book, and kuru-kṣetra sits right beside it. One name points to what is right; the other is just a place, named after an ancestor. Put together, they frame the question the Gita actually asks: what does doing right look like on real ground, among real people you love, where every choice costs something?
Notice too that the king asks "what did they do?" He wants an outcome. He is already reaching past the present moment for the result. Krishna will spend the whole of Chapter 2 taking that exact habit apart.