He ate in the palace. He slept under its roof. His counsel shaped wars, saved lives, and went completely unheeded. Vidura was the wisest man in Hastinapura and also, by the logic of the household, the one whose word carried the least weight when it mattered most. That particular combination, deep belonging and structural exclusion, is not something the Mahabharata invented. It describes a person in almost every Indian joint family alive today.
