Reading Notes: Mahabharata D

For the second part of this week's reading I think I am going to look at death in the Mahabharata which is everywhere in part D. We see some long forgotten plots like Amba's come to fruition. There were three main characters that I will focus to chose on this week. These characters are Abhimanyu, Krishna, and Drona.

Abhimanyu: The death of Abhimanyu was very tragic. He was first disarmed as he was so fearsome when he was armed that he could not be slain and he was blinded. After this Duhshasana leaps forward and bludgeons him in his face.

Krishna: Krishna's death is a lot more subtle than Abhimanyu's. It is not intentional. Krishna gets shot in the ankle by an arrow and dies. This is the one mortal spot he had, similar to greek mythology and the Achilles heel.

Drona: Drona's death is also tragic like Abhimanyu's. Drona is a great warrior and he has divine weapons like we say earlier and in the Ramayana. Still grieving over his son, Drona can not think to procure these weapons and instead charges at the other warriors and is slain that way.

Krishna's Death

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Source: PDE Mahabharata 

Reading Notes: Mahabharata Part C

In this set of reading notes I think that I am going to draw mainly from Life in the Forest. In this section the Pandava princes walk further into the forest where Draupadi followed them. A brahmin then tells the rajah to call on a sun god. He does in a prayer and then Surya appears. He gives him a copper pot that has infinite food in it. For twelve years the Pandavas lived in the forest.  One day Krishna comes to visit the forest.

Surya the Sun God

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Mahabharata C: Source

Wikipedia Train: Yaure Language to Rugby World Cup

To begin this Wikipeida trail I looked through the Twitter feed and found the Yaure mask. I chose this piece as it is located in the St. Louis Art Museum, a place I have been to many times as I am from St. Louis. I then went on Wikipedia and then looked at the Yaure language. I learned that Yaure is a language of west Africa.

Ivory Coast: Then I clicked on Ivory Coast as I feel as though it is a country I do not know a lot about so I would like to learn more about it. I went through the table of contents and found out what sports they like to play as sports are one of those things that unify a whole group of people

1995 Rugby World Cup: From here I clicked on the 1995 Rugby World Cup as this was the first world cup that Ivory Coast qualified to play in. It was also the first major sporting even to be held in South Africa after apartheid ended which is a big deal.

Rugby World Cup: I wanted to learn a little more about rugby so then I went on to learn about the Rugby World Cup as a whole. The most recent competition took place in Japan where South Africa beat England to get their 3rd world cup.

The mask that started it all. Source

Growth Mindset: Original Thinkers Video

One new thing that I learned from this video is that people that procrastinate (Although it is a bad habit don't get me wrong), tend to be more creative thinkers. I am also curious as to why this is. One hypothesis I have is that when you have less time to do something you have to find ways to do the same task more quickly so maybe you are more used to thinking outside the box to do something. I think I am going to google more about this. Maybe something along the lines of "procrastination and creativity correlation". I'm sure there are some studies done on this subject even if they are not by the New England Journal of Medicine or Nature.





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Micro-fiction: The Tortoise and the Hare

As the hare lays there comfortable with his lead,
the tortoise makes progress like a fast mare and finishes ahead of the hares heed.

Hare was lazy, Turtle was steady.

Authors note: The story that I chose to condense and make my own microfiction out of is the classic story of the tortoise and the hare. What was interesting to me is that the story is listed as the hare and the tortoise but I have only ever heard it flipped as the tortoise and the hare. I don't think I ever really struggled with making the story as the original is pretty short to begin with but I did have to stop and think for the 25 word one to use words that would rhyme, but still convey meaning instead of just not making any sense.

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EC: Week 6 Biographical Writing

For this week I think I will be writing about my weekend for extra credit because I think it was very enriching and is a weekend I will remember for a long time.

This weekend a couple of friends and I drove up to Tulsa, OK for a friend's sister's quinceanera. For those of you unfamiliar, a quinceanera is a coming of age ceremony for a hispanic girl when she turns 15. We left Friday night and first stopped at the hotel to drop our stuff off, but then we went to my friend's house to eat some food. Not only was his house out in the boonies somewhere but the food there was out of this world. I'm already a big fan of Mexican food but when it is authentic and spicy and fresh I'm in heaven. We ate to our hearts content and the next day was the actual quinceanera. I had never been to a quinceanera so I had no idea what to expect but it was a great time. There were a ton of people, and once again great food. The dress his sister was wearing was also very pretty. It was a light pink kind of like what is shown below. We ate and drank and danced to our heart's content. It was a very fun weekend as I love big family functions like that. I think in the future I need to go to more quinceaneras.

An example of the dress that his sister wore

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Biography

I think the stupidest thing I have ever done probably goes back to my childhood where my friends and I would play in our back alley way. I'm convinced that when you are a child you have a +10 luck stat that you slowly lose when you get older. In my back yard there was a big paved road that my garage backs up to. My friend lived right next to me so often times we would ride bikes down it really fast and then lock our back wheels to see who could make the longest skid mark. This wasn't even the stupid part. The stupid part was that sometimes we would play a game where we would see if somebody could get a stick through the spokes as they rode down at full speed. Kinda like this meme but somebody else doing the sticking. Luckily nobody ever managed to actually get it through. If they did we would probably go flying.

Our game

I chose this story because I the prompt of the stupidest thing you've ever done was funny.

Reading Notes: PDE Mahabharata Part A/B

For this week's reading I wanted to read the PDE version of the Mahabharata as I think it is a little more accessible and easier to understand. The hardest part of this week's reading is to keep all the names straight, especially when we see generations grow and new generations arise. It was also a lot to keep track of in terms of the several smaller stories that were intertwined into the main one. I found myself Googling the names a lot to look at the family tree to remind myself of the relations, kind of like Game of Thrones honestly. Below is the family tree that I used and helped me.

Family Tree

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Storybook Plan

I think for my storybook I am going to make it animals of Africa-ish themed and try to retell stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata but using different animals that you would find in Africa. I think by doing this maybe I think I would use the stories that include the celestial weapons in them. These stories would come from the Ramayana. As far as perspective I think I am going to use a third person omniscient story teller, maybe like Rafiki from The Lion King type deal. I'm not exactly sure what main lessons I want my stories to have. I think that I will write them like those little stories that you read when you're kids where each story has its own little life lesson.

Assorted animals of Africa

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Biography Week 5

One of my earliest childhood memories that I can remember vividly is my experience learning to ride a bike without training wheels. When I was younger my family used to live in an apartment complex and all of the kids that I used to hang out with me were maybe a year or two older than me, around 6 or 7 years old. I was still in preschool at the time. When all the other kids were playing outside and riding their bikes around without training wheels I couldn't and 5 year old me felt excluded. I remember my mom  helping me taking them off and holding me up as I tried to learn. I also remember riding into a car and probably leaving a scratch. Eventually I just told her to let go and went for it. I did learn that day and it is one of my first accomplishments.

Little kid with a bike that looks like mine

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Microfiction Week 5

Left an exile. Came back King.

This story is the closest synopsis I could make of The Lion King. I have been writing a lot about lions so I figured the Lion King would be a good story that everybody knows.

Girl sacrifices herself for her dad. Proves she can do what any man can.

Keeping with the theme of Disney movies I wanted to summarize Mulan in two sentences.

Source: Pixabay

Reading Notes: Ramayana C

This week I focused more on my project of writing about the weapons in the Ramayana.

One of the best examples of this is in Vali's Death. Bows are a very dominant trope in the stories and in this story. Bows are used a lot in slaying and defense. Snakes are also a very common theme and are usually portrayed as evil. In this case we see a snake-like arrow being shot from a bow. 

The Death of King Vali

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Feedback Strategies

The two articles I read are Be A Mirror and How to Give Bad Feedback Without Being a Jerk. I chose the first article because, honestly, I didn't know what being a mirror meant and I wanted to know more about what the article could possibly be about. This article talked about the five different qualities of feedback that people with a growth mindset have. Being a mirror involves giving feedback in a way that promotes these 5 qualities.

The second article that I read is about how to give negative feedback without sounding like a jerk. This is something that I struggle with and I either sound too mean or I just neglect to mention the negatives. I think the biggest point is that you need to explain why you are giving feedback. If people understand that you are trying to better them they will be more willing to accept it and not look down upon you.

Being a mirror

Source: Pixabay

Topic Research: The Weapons of the Ramayana

 

The weapons of the Ramayana that I have encountered so far have really fallen into two categories. These are the "mortal weapons" like the bow and arrow that was used or "celestial weapons" that the gods used. Whenever times get really tough Rama seems to draw upon a celestial weapon to do a lot of damage.

When looking more into these celestial weapons I learned that each deity has a different celestial weapon that they are associated with. Here are three examples of this.

The Trishula: The trishula is a trident that is wielded by Shiva the Destroyer and is said that it can not be stopped by anybody but Shiva himself.

The Manavastra: This weapon is commonly wielded by Manu and was used by Sri Rama on the demon Maricha. We have already seen Maricha in theses epics taking the form of a golden deer to lure Rama out of hiding.

The Gada: The gada is a mace that Hanuman carries. This weapon is particularly interesting to me as it is one of the most recognizable weapons in Hinduism. You see it in basically every picture of Hanuman, resting on his shoulder. Interestingly, I never actually knew what it was called but the word "Gada" in Telugu, the language I speak basically means lump so I thought this was a fun little connection. 

Lord Hanuman with his mace

Source: Flickr