Week 2 Reading Overview
Hello all! Today is my first day back at school, so I'm writing this in-between my music classes. First thing to cover in this post is which version of the Ramayana I will be reading this semester. I will be reading R.K. Narayan's novel adaptation because I had already purchased the book before realizing that I had a choice of which version to read. Besides already owning the book, I have heard high praises about Narayan's adaptation and am excited to read it for myself.
The next thing to cover is my exploration of the Indian Comic Books and India Video Playlist. I'll start by talking about two of the comics that caught my attention. I was only able to read the summaries but I would love to check out the physical copies and read all of the stories that contained. The first comic I checked out was Shiva Parvati: A Story of Divine Love. I was drawn to this one because the allure of love stories is universal among different mythologies. I also wanted to read this one because I wasn't familiar with the names of the main characters, most of my reading having been about the Ramayana so far. The second comic the piqued my interest was Tales of Durga: Tales of the Mother Goddess. I was interested in this one because I recognized the name Durga from a Fantasy-Mythology series called Tiger's Curse, but did not know anything about her stories in Indian mythology. The traditional stories about Durga were more interesting than the adaptation in the book series, so I was glad to have read the summary of the comic.
As for the video playlist, many of the videos sounded interesting and I wanted to watch most of them! However, I decided it's best to start small and I began with this video that outlines the parallels between Greek and Indian Mythology and this video made by CrashCourse that gives a very broad overview of the Ramayana. I chose the first video because I am more familiar with Greek mythology, and I figured that a look into the similarities between the two mythologies would be a good starting point for the rest of this class. I chose the CrashCourse video because I have watched their videos for other topics and found them very informative and entertaining, so I figured it would be another good starting point for the journey I'll be taking during this class.
To finish up this post, I chose a picture of Rama and Sita during the coronation of Rama. I chose this picture because after watching the CrashCourse video, I'm very interested to learn more about Rama, Sita, and their adventures.
Hi Rebecca, just a quick note to say that Narayan's Ramayana is really wonderful: he conveys some of the lavish poetry of Kamban in a way that is totally different from what I tried to do with the "tiny tales" versions of the epics. I didn't finish the Ramayana book until December and I just finished the Mahabharata book on Sunday (gulp! just in time ha ha)... and the Bookstore doesn't like you to change the listings that late. If you want to read the Tiny Tales versions later on in the semester, there are those weeks of free reading that come later, so you can read Narayan and then read the Tiny Tales and compare. Narayan's books are really excellent (plus I think it's really important to have an Indian author, and he is such an important author in India!), so my main motivation for doing the Tiny Tales was to make sure people had a free version to choose. Plus I just wanted to see if it was possible to tell the epics in this weird way, and I am happy with how they turned out... but it is very different from Narayan's beautiful novelistic style. :-)
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