Indian Epics Blog

This week is met with many different sources of stress and many different sources of work. I started work at a new consultancy company part time, which results in less time to study, but a different challenge overall. With tests coming up, it will be interesting to see how I am able to balance different classes with needing to sleep eight hours per day, and how I can also balance that against needing to cook my own foods. There is a sense of urgency in everything I do now as I must spend more time working on classes in my free time, and I do not have the same time to simply goof around. While I still plan on slacking off to the best of my abilities, I unfortunately have to focus some efforts on classes. We have had quizzes in numerical methods, hard homeworks in thermodynamics, and difficult questions in complex analysis. This, combined with reading research papers at my job and delving out the minutiae vs. the substance is resulting in an increased difficulty in my time overall. B...

This week, I used the starting point of the Ramayana for my Wikipedia trail, which ended up with the page for Espresso. First, we start with the Ramayana , which is an epic Indian Poem. In the poem, the exile of Rama and his wife, Sita is described, as well as their eventual return. There are stories of different Gods and monsters within it. It is one of the largest poems in existence with over 24,000 verses and over 500 chapters. The common themes are that of honesty, duty, and the ideal son and father. Within the Ramayana was the post for: Indonesia . Indonesia is an archipelago (collection of close islands) north of Australia. It is one of the most populated islands and has been an important trade region for many years. Since it is so close to the equator, there is not four different seasons, but rather, a dry season and a wet season. This results in a decently tropical climate as a whole. Within the page for Indonesia was a page for: Coffee.   Coffee is a drink that ...

This week, I decided to learn more about sleep. In their article, " Why Sleeping May Be More Important Than Studying," Mindshift delves into a study of students, and the effect that a lack of sleep can have on their abilities to perform in the classroom. The interesting thing about this article is that while the study does show sleep to be more important than we might have thought, sacrificing sleep for studying often leads to lower performance in the classroom. The article notes that when children took tests, they not only could not remember the material as well, their short term memory would also fail. An interesting follow-up to this article would be over college students since the material is more difficult, but routine sleep deprived people might develop immunities to the short term difficulties the students in this study face. In order to maximize the utility of this article, I am still planning on maintaining a regular sleep schedule, going to bed at around the sa...

This week, I looked at student quotes in order to hopefully gain a change in perspective or new thought related to the growth mindset and improvement. I found the quotes on a Padlet . Two quotes that really stuck out were: "I was so focused on not failing that I almost missed the whole point of school. To learn. And you learn from your mistakes, from your past. You don't learn anything from doing nothing wrong. You have to mess up to learn, you have to mess up to grow." This one stuck out to me because it epitomizes a lot of what people struggle with in school. We generally just focus on getting the grade, and subordinate learning to be a secondary consideration. This results in moving on to the next year without being prepared and still not learning in the next year either. "I want to pay more attention to the growth rather than the speed. I always try to learn things quickly and have many times crammed before an exam without actually learning the concepts. I feel l...

This week, I had the opportunity to learn more about positive feedback, as opposed to last week where I learned more about negative feedback. The two articles I read were Why Do So Many Managers Avoid Giving Praise?  and Five Reasons to Stop Saying "Good Job!" First, Why Do So Many Managers Avoid Giving Praise by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. This article is interesting because it delves further into the ratios of positive vs. negative feedback that managers give. I found one thing interesting that managers often decide not to give positive feedback because they want to be seen as the tough boss that tells it as it is; however, many times, people rave about the great boss they have and how they can feel comfortable talking to them when they mess up. It would be interesting to see more employee side surveys where they see which kind of manager employees would rather have, then they compare the efficiencies of the two groups. Alternatively, it would be interesting to see th...

This week, I am working on deciding a few possible stories that I could write about related to the topic of Indra, the Thunder God. Three possible stories that came to my mind after doing some research are: his weapon, the Vajra, his identity compared to other Thunder Gods, and finally, a retelling of defeating the drought serpent, the Vritra. First, the Vajra . The vajra often shows up in use, and it is stated that an instrument maker, Tvastra, created it for him, but it might be interesting to retell a story of how it was created, or to give another look into modeling the Tvastra as we do modern day cars, where there are many considerations made for common uses and more economical uses as well. Next, I could compare Indra to other gods . In the Heroes of Olympus stories, by Rick Riordan, there is mention that the gods Ares and Mars are actually the same god, they just embody a different persona based on culture and times. I would be interested in perhaps comparing two cultures (s...

There was once a terrible monster named Thataka, the father of a terrible demon named TJ, or Thataka Junior. He lived in the Midwest plains and often looked for challengers. One day, he saw a man, named DJ, short for Dasharatha Junior, and his friends, Dasharatha Junior Friend 1 and Dasharatha Junior Friend 2. They were wandering in the plains, and surveying the area for future settlement. The demon Thataka started throwing random hay bales and tumbleweeds at the group of friends, and began bellowing as loudly as he could. This startled the group of friends, and they began preparing a strategy to fight him. DJ returned fire by slashing Thataka with a sword, and Thataka, in order to regain a competitive advantage, blinded DJ. However, using the power of echolocation, DJ was still able to locate Thataka, and using the “spray and pray” strategy with his sword, began slashing Thataka into pieces. The demon was defeated and died, however, there was news of Thataka’s death that eventually m...

This week, I continue my reading of the Ramayana with part B. While it is a continuance of part A, I did notice a few things that made it slightly different. Namely, there is a lot of focus on dialogue, and what is conveyed within dialogue vs. narration. Previously, I had noted that the narration seemed to quickly gloss over large details sometimes vs. the narration going into longer, drawn out statements like in the wedding. In the story Rama and Bharata and Shurpanakha and Rama, there is a great effort made into lengthy monologues about a certain virtue such as honesty and integrity vs. a character such as Rama. These are interesting to the reader because of the care put into stringy out such a long description. The other interesting story is Viradha, where a monster attacks Rama and his group. The most interesting thing about this story is that while they try to kill him with arrows and blows, for some odd reason, they decided to let him capture them, and put them on his should...

This week, we began reading the Ramayana, and we started off with parts A and B. I decided to read the public domain edition (PDE.) The first thing that stuck out to me was how quickly the poem churns through different characters within each story, while Rama remains constant. The reason it seems to churn through the characters is because of how monotonically the stories are told. The story where Rama defeats the woman that can turn invisible while still throwing boulders at them stands out as one example, because even though they are in great danger, it is told in the same inflection as when Rama lifts the bow. The other thing that stood out during these stories was the parallels to other tales and stories that I am already accustomed to. Dasharatha’s inability to have a son parallels nicely with Abraham’s inability to have a son, the bow challenge is reminiscent of the story of King Arthur, and the tests Rama faces parallel with the tests Jesus faced during his forty days in the...