बलं बलवतां चाहं कामरागविवर्जितम्।धर्माविरुद्धो भूतेषु कामोऽस्मि भरतर्षभ॥
balaṃ balavatāṃ cāhaṃ kāma-rāga-vivarjitamdharmāviruddho bhūteṣu kāmo ’smi bharatarṣabha
Word by word
The verse says
I am the strength of the strong, free of craving and heat. And in living beings I am desire itself, when it does not run against what is right.
In plain words
Two careful qualifications in one verse.
Strength, yes — but strength that is not driving at something for itself.
And then a line most people miss: desire is divine, so long as it is not pulling against what is right. Wanting is not the problem.
Where you've felt this · at work
Two people at work want the same job when it comes open. One wants it because the work is genuinely his and he would do it well. The other wants it because a colleague of his must not have it. From outside they look identical — both stay late, both prepare. Only one of them will still be worth having on the day it arrives.
Going deeper
Desire itself is claimed here as divine, with a single condition attached: dharma-aviruddha, not running against what is right.
It is a far smaller restriction than the one people assume this book makes. Whole traditions have been built on the idea that desire is the disease. This verse says desire as such is Krishna in you: the pull toward life, the reason you get out of bed. Only the wanting that cuts across what is right falls outside that.
The same care is taken with strength. Strength without craving is still strength. Nothing has been thinned out; what has gone is the hunger attached to it.
So the instruction hidden here is not to want less. It is to look at what a particular wanting is pulling against, if anything. A want that costs nobody anything is not a spiritual problem, whatever else it may be.