उत्सीदेयुरिमे लोका न कुर्यां कर्म चेदहम्।सङ्करस्य च कर्ता स्यामुपहन्यामिमाः प्रजाः॥
utsīdeyur ime lokā na kuryāṃ karma ced ahamsankarasya ca kartā syām upahanyām imāḥ prajāḥ
Word by word
The verse says
If I stopped working, these worlds would fall apart. I would be the cause of everything running together, and I would destroy these people.
In plain words
The consequence, stated at full scale.
Worlds utsīdeyuḥ — would sink, collapse, go under. And Krishna would be the one who did it.
The phrase for the collapse is saṅkara — a running-together, a confusion of what was distinct.
Where you've felt this · in grief
One person in a family quietly held all the arrangements. They stop, for good reasons. Within a year nobody is calling anybody, and no single person decided that.
Going deeper
Saṅkara is a loaded word and the loading should be named.
In its own context it means varṇa-saṅkara, the mixing of the social orders — the same anxiety Arjuna voiced at 1.41, which this edition flagged there as belonging to a particular society at a particular time. Krishna is using the vocabulary of that world.
What the word means more broadly is the loss of distinction: things that were held apart running together until nothing has a shape. That sense survives the social frame and is the part worth carrying.
The structural claim is the interesting one. Order is not a state things rest in. It is a thing being continuously done, and it requires somebody to keep doing it. Stop, and the default is not stillness. The default is collapse.
Which is the answer to Arjuna's deepest assumption. He believes stepping back is a way of doing nothing. Krishna has now said, twice, that there is no such move available — and here, that he himself does not have it either.