Epics of India

For my Week 2 extra credit reading, I chose to focus on a couple of stories. Both stories are from  The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India by W. H. D. Rouse. The first story I wanted to take notes over was The Mouse and the Farmer. On a side note I like the fact that most of these stories use animals to convey human thoughts and emotions, and often the humans are the unintelligent ones in the story. Regardless, my first thought about this story and many of the other stories was how much luck and randomness seems to be involved. I understand that the point of the stories are to convey a certain lesson or moral, but in this story for example, how unlikely is it that the farmer's land is completely covered in gold that he's just not aware of. And that the only reason the gold is included in the story is to eventually lead to the cat being overly greedy about food. I know I'm overanalyzing this but it, like many of the other stories, seem like quite a stretch to get ...

The first article I chose to discuss is  Make Good Art: Neil Gaiman’s Advice on the Creative Life, Adapted by Chip Kidd. I chose this article because pushing your own limits and trying new experiences is something I've been trying to focus on a lot in recent years, and this article discusses the importance of that. The first important piece of advice he gives, and I'll relate it to myself personally and trying new things instead of just making art, is that it's important to push your limits on your bad days as well as your good days. No matter what happens in any given moment, there are chances for you to push yourself, to try something new, and to be successful at it. Take advantage of it. The second thing he said that really stuck out to me was the idea that constantly trying new things changes you as a person. I think a lot of people have it ingrained in their mind that at a certain point we stop changing as people. I think that if we want to experience life as it is t...

For my first topic idea of my storybook, I've chosen Dasharatha , one of the stories in the Ramayana. I wrote about this topic in my reading overview blog post, and was initially drawn to it by the moral dilemmas it seemed to pose. I'm fascinated by open-ended questions where there is no clear side to argue for, and this topic appears to provide plenty of those. I have no previous knowledge on the topic, but I'm interested to learn how the Ramayana and specifically the epics about Dasharatha approach moral conflicts. Due to my interest in the situations this topic will provide, I think I could use the dilemmas involved to practice expanding my creativity, and I think it will be more feasible for me to stray away from the original story more and just focus on the morals. I'm specifically interested in the topic of Dasharatha's end, where he makes an ultimate choice that ends his life. I'd like to make a story revolving around this idea, where a character makes th...

There was once a powerful monkey king, Brahmadatta, who lived in the jungle. He was surrounded by a tribe of all female monkeys, as he had killed any son that had been born into the tribe. One day, one of the female monkeys was going to give birth and, fearing for the life of her son, escaped far away to the outskirts of the jungle. The son, Bodhisatta, was born and was safe, and soon grew to be much larger and stronger than was normal for a monkey of his tribe. One day, Bodhisatta's mother decided to tell him about his father. "Your father is a powerful monkey king who lives in the heart of the jungle", she said. "Why did you take me away from him?", asked Bodhisatta. "Your father is fearful of losing his power, so he would've killed you had I not." "I want you to take me to him", said Bodhisatta. His mother reluctantly agreed, knowing that if she didn't he would go by himself. When Bodhisatta returned to the tribe, his fath...

For these reading notes, I've chosen to focus on a couple of stories, which are linked below, and to focus on the plots of each of them, as they were interesting and similar but had a few key differences. The Cunning Crane and the Crab by W. H. D. Rouse The Monkey who Gathered Lotuses by Robert Chalmers The Cunning Crane: I enjoyed this story because it was not only about the use of wit for both good and bad, but also about karma and one's ability to think for themselves. In this story there are two ponds, one that dries up every summer and becomes very warm, and another that is always cool and covered by shade. The warm pond is filled with fish, who are consequently miserable every summer as the pond heats up. A crane lives at the cool pond, and he convinces the fish that he could carry them in his beak to the nicer pond. After convincing them, he manages to eat every single fish, and somehow still being hungry tries to convince a crab in the warm pond of the same thi...

For week 3, I've chosen the public domain version of Ramayana. I've chosen this mostly because it'll be free, but also because it will be interesting to see the many different writing styles involved from all of the authors who contributed to it. For the comic books on the Bizzell web page, I've chosen Dasharatha: The Story of Roma's Father and Kubera: The Lord of Wealth . I chose Dasharatha because it appears to tell the story of a life filled with tragedy and learned lessons, which seems interesting, and I chose Kubera because it tells the tale of a virtuous struggle between brothers and seemed thought-provoking.  For videos, I've chosen Ancient Technology - Atlantis and India and Rama and the Ramayana . I chose the first video because a discussion of the technology developed in ancient India seemed fascinating, and I chose the second video because it was created by Crash Course, and I've always found their videos to be very informative.  Image ...