कृपया परयाऽऽविष्टो विषीदन्निदमब्रवीत्।दृष्ट्वेमं स्वजनं कृष्ण युयुत्सुं समुपस्थितम्॥
dṛṣṭvemaṃ sva-janaṃ kṛṣṇa yuyutsuṃ samupasthitam
Word by word
The verse says
Arjuna said: Krishna, seeing my own people standing here wanting to fight,
In plain words
He speaks for the first time since asking to be driven forward, and the sentence does not finish. It runs straight into the next verse.
He gets out one phrase: seeing my own people. Sva-janam — my own. That is the word doing the damage.
An hour ago they were the enemy. He has not learned anything new about them. He has just looked.
Where you've felt this · in community
You can argue with a name on a screen for weeks. Then you meet them once, briefly, and find you cannot type the same sentences any more. Nothing they said has changed. You have simply seen a face now.
Going deeper
Sva-jana is a tender word. It means one's own people, the ones who belong to you.
But notice the two halves of the phrase pulling against each other. My own people — wanting to fight. They are his, and they are here to kill him. Both are true. He cannot make either half go away, and he cannot hold them together.
The Gita opens its main action on this exact contradiction, and it is not a puzzle that thinking harder solves. Arjuna will spend nineteen verses trying, and his arguments will get steadily weaker, because the problem is not in his reasoning.
What has actually happened is that a word has moved. The men opposite shifted from them to mine, and his whole ability to act went with it. Much of what Krishna teaches from here on concerns that word, and how much of a life gets decided by where a person draws the line around mine.