Epics of India

The stories in this bit of reading had a bunch of different elephant themes in them. The story that interested me most, however, was the one of the deer kings. There were two different kinds of deer, each with their own king, and a human king who liked to hunt and eat deer. The townsfolk got tired of hunting with the king so they drove all the deer into a park to make hunting for the king easy. The deer were tired of being randomly hunted, so both deer kings decided to draw lots in their own herds and alternate which group sacrificed a deer each day. A doe with a fawn drew the lot one day and asked for mercy from her king who denied her. She then went to the other deer king who went in her place. Seeing the kindness of this deer king, the human king decided not to hunt anymore deer from the park or the forest. The doe and her fawn Bibliography Title : Jataka Tales Author : Ellen C. Babbitt Illustrator : Ellsworth Young Year : 1912

Quite a few of these stories were the same as the Jataka tales we read before, but there were also plenty of new ones. The on I enjoyed the most was a story of a golden bowl. In it, there were two merchants who would travel to different towns, agreeing to split the towns into their own respective areas. The first merchant was very greedy, and came upon an old lady and little girl who were dirt poor. To make the little girl happy, the old lady offered an old bowl from her late husband in trade, not knowing it was made of gold. The merchant realized he could get it for nothing with a little bit of acting, so he said it was worthless, dropped it in the dirt and walked off. Seeing that the greedy merchant had already been down this street, the nice merchant decided to try and sell his wares here. He came upon the old lady and realized her bowl was gold and gave her all his wares for it, left town and sold it for a very large sum. The greedy merchant came back later to offer a small sum to

Here is the link for the video I watched on Narayan for extra reading this week. First, this video talks about the god Narayan, obviously. It talks about reincarnation, and how this makes Hindus much different from Muslims and Christians. It tells of how Narayan is sometimes thought of as time itself. The next part that really interested me was the part with Markandeya. There was a lot of talk about how things are destroyed in order for new things to be created, and how then entirety of the universe is one massive cycle of creation and destruction. This part kind of segways into the reincarnation again talking about how death is only a small pause rather than a complete halt to any entity. The video later gets back to this and talks about the kind of culture that stems from this kind of belief and how no one has a sense of urgency in their life, because they know that death isn't the end of it. Markandeya Bibliography: Author: Devdutt Pattanaik Title: Seven Secrets fr

I started by looking at an Indian holiday called Janmashtami  which is actually just a celebration of the birth of Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. There is a bunch of fasting, eating, dancing, and meditating that happens in celebration of this holiday. This made me look closer at Krishna himself, and I learned quite a bit about how he has been portrayed through Hindu literature, and how those portrayals inspired dances such as  Kathakali , which is like a play and a dance all in one. They also wear costumes like the one below. Kathakali Costume From that page, I also found a link to Bharata Muni . He was essentially the father of Indian theater and was an ancient dramaturg. 

Here is this really neat video previewing some of the art from the graphic novels in Bizzell. I haven't had the chance to go look at them, but maybe once my semester tapers off, I'll finally get the chance to head over. The art in this looks really well done, so it would just be nice to look through once before I graduate. And here is the cover one one of those novels :

A few weeks ago, I started looking into deskercises for this class, and I've gotta say, they are still pretty useful. I use them quite often, and I find that I am less stiff when I leave the chair or wake up the next morning. I have also added the shadow boxing stretch from this link to my repertoire of stretches. It is just a fun one that I really enjoy. I think I will continue doing these exercises well into the future. link

The motto I use isn't actually one that I necessarily made up, but one that I have always used, just because it is perfect for me. It might seem silly, but it is "Keep moving forward" from Meet the Robinsons, which is a pretty great movie. I really like this motto, because it helps to keep me from stopping whenever I run into some difficult problem.

What I found that works best for me is organizing my bookmarks into different folders. When I no longer need a particular folder, i.e. if it was for a class I already finished, I just delete it. I tend to bookmark a lot of things, but I can usually sort them pretty well into just a handful of folders, thus keeping my bookmark bar from getting cluttered. I also make sure that my bookmarks are shared between my devices, so that I always have them when I need them, just in case I can't remember a particular site.

This spring break has been pretty crazy. Unlike most people, I didn't actually get a break. Instead, I was doing a bunch of work for my capstone and getting our lab set up. I also spent 2 days just trying to find myself a new car. But you know what? I got one, and I am pretty happy with it. Needs some TLC, but nothing too extreme. As far as my lab goes, everything is looking really good and we are doing the last few things today. We got a bunch of parts machined this week and ran a bunch of wires between our control boxes and our test equipment. I can't wait to start on our actual tests. In the picture, you cant see our test equipment, but you can see a big green thing; that's a pretty neat  wind tunnel . Our rocket testing stuff is going on the far side of that. Testing lights in our lab (Personal Photo) I also finally got to do some editing on my Abyssal Struggle story. I have been waiting to do this for what seems like forever, and it felt good to finally g

The story I am thinking about writing is the one I just took notes for. It is the mantra that Kunti gained from sage Durvasa after she showed him kindness when all others at the palace only showed fear. He whispered the mantra to her and told her only that it could summon any god. I guess she was bored, because she decided to just try it out and ended up summoning the sun god Surya. She ended up having a child with him. I am only really interested in the mantra itself here. If I write a new story from this, that is the part I am going to keep. I had mentioned in my reading notes a little bit of the kind of battle I would want to write about, but I think I can flesh that description out a little more. I want some kind of wide open battlefield on the outskirts of a well defended city. I might set it in the Terai-Duar  grasslands, where everything is pretty open and flat. I think I will start it at a late stage in the battle, where the city gate is about to be breached. This is w

The story I've picked to focus on this time is that of how Kunti gained her mantra. Growing up, she amused a very irritable sage, who then gave her a mantra that allowed her to summon any god. She tried it out and summoned the sun god, who left her with a child. I kind of want to just run with the concept of summoning gods for a story. Kind of what I am picturing is some massive battle where a defending force looks to be defeated, but someone steps forward and brings down a god into the fray and wipes the field of enemies away. Link Bibliography: Author: Epified Title: The Mahabharata Link

One story that stood out this week was that of King Shantanu revisiting the Gange river 16 years after his wife had disappeared with his son. He was interrupted by an archer taming the river with his arrows. Gange appeared and introduced the archer as his son, Devavrata. I feel that I would just want to pull Devavrata from this story and have him fighting some kind of river spirit. I don't really enjoy many of the stories in the beginning of the Mahabharata, so this seems like the best plan I can see myself getting behind. Something like this. .. Bibliography: Author: Epified Title: The Mahabharata Link

This seems to have been a very weird week for me. Quite a lot of anxiety, but also some really exciting things.   To start off, I finally got word back from my insurance that my car was totaled from a little incident in the rain, so that has been quite the bit of stress. But I also got the opportunity to talk with some representatives from the CIA who came looking to find new engineers to come work at the agency. We got to do a mission simulation with them and then learned about what it would be like to work for them. Honestly, I can very easily picture myself working there and enjoying every second of it for my entire career. CIA This week has been very easy for this class, since it has all been free passes and reviews. It was a welcome break and helped me get all my other stuff back on track for other courses. Plus, I had time   to finish up the analysis for a wing project for my aerospace structures class. My teammates have just finished building what we designed, so we get

The video I found most interesting is actually an advertisement for an on campus event. I'm kind of sad I didn't have time to go check this out, but there is always more events. Here's the video. The image I found is brilliant and very accurately describes my feelings about daylight savings. link

I'm very happy with my progress so far. I am well on my way to finishing this course over spring break, so that makes me feel a lot better about how much work I've been doing lately. I've really enjoyed the project assignments, as they let me focus more than anything else on what I am most interested in and give an excellent creative outlet. Since I'm looking to finish up in about 2-3 weeks, I just want to avoid getting complacent and missing assignments that will set back my personal timeline. When I finish up, I'll have an A in the class and finally bring my course load down from 18 hours to a peaceful 15. I want this so my college career finishes up with plenty of free time for me to sit back and relax. To motivate myself, here is a cool image from my childhood. Never ceases to be cool to look at. Space Shuttle

I have gotten some really good comments on my project over the last couple of weeks. Some comments repeats or are answered in my author's note, but for the most part, I have been receiving mostly format and grammar suggestions. These help me to find mistakes I have made, and also serve to make my site more visually appealing. I've noticed that rather than focus on things like typos, I have been giving advice about how well a story flows when I give feedback to others. I know that other people will point out any grammatical issues, so I have been attempting to provide some variety in my feedback and insight that the author may not get otherwise. By looking through other people's stories, I can absorb their word choice and imagery and play around with it and see if there are different ways for me to flesh out my own tales. I'm pretty happy with my blog so far, and I feel I have put a lot of posts into it at this point. I still think my introduction does a decent job o

Overall, I enjoyed the Ramayana a lot more than I have the Mahabharata. It might just be because I have been a lot busier, but I'm not sure that's the whole reason. I just cant seem to enjoy the characters nearly as much as I did with Ravana and Hanuman. It's actually been a lot of fun writing about Hanuman in  my portfolio, and I'm kind of sad that his stories are harder to find in the Ramayana versions we have. As far as notes go, I usually take mine about the story I want to re-write, but occasionally I go back and find a different story to write that I didn't take notes for. I've learned to focus much more on the sparse details offered about the environment and sensations experienced in each story rather than the summary. The reason for this is that the plot is usually very straight forward. The image here is what I was originally going to use for my 'Abyssal Struggle' story. I picked it because it's interesting to me how I had completely dif

This week, I looked more into configuring my canvas profile. I have a very active discussion board in another course, so this may be useful for that since I added a new picture of myself. The picture I chose is me posing next to one of the jet engines in Felgar Hall, as they are some of the coolest things around here.  I didn't really want to flatter myself with a title, although I could have put one of my officer positions. I also elected not to put a bio, since I don't believe anyone except my professors can see that and I like to keep a pretty professional relationship in place.

I wanted to learn more about Shiva this week, so that was my starting point. I found out that among his countless fearsome and brutal depictions, he is also known as the god of yoga. Learning about Shiva led me to wonder about other Hindu deities , so I followed a link for principal deities. What I found here is that Hinduism has a very large number of deities. I also followed a link for Devi , since I had no idea what it was. Turns out, that is is just the Sanskrit word for goddess. In this new page I found reference to a goddess named Mahatmya, who is the inspiration of Shaktism . This is a really interesting ideology within Hinduism in which the supreme being is female. This has a lot to do with entities such as Kali, and is a really interesting read. Shaktism

F ailure I s S uccess' H erald I just thought about how failure is the first step towards a success, and rolled with it until I found a word that let me say what I wanted. That just happened to be fish, and the words ' just keep swimming' come to mind. Dory

I had the chance to see someone practicing empathy this week. One of friends is also a close friend of my girlfriend, and they were having a pretty rough go of it this week. My girlfriend took the extra time out of her busy schedule to sit down and just talk with him and validate the problems he has been facing. She wasn't offering suggestions or ways to fix his problems, because that isn't what he needed. Right then, he just needed someone to listen to him and reassure him that what was bothering him wasn't something trivial. I think that is really important to know what people need at any given time and knowing what you should and should not try to do for them. Link

With the end of my college career rapidly approaching, I have been feeling the pressure of not having a definite job even more than normal this week. On the bright side, I've been talking with some friends who recently graduated and they said they will poke around at the places they work and see if they can't get me an in somewhere. Here's to hoping! In other news, my capstone project is finally progressing again, and it looks like the worst of a sudden bureaucracy storm is past now. With that in the rear view mirror, I have been busying myself with soldering and wiring diagrams, trying to get our circuit work done as quick as possible so we can start testing these rocket nozzles. Here is a plot we generated of the predicted Mach numbers from one of our nozzles when we run air through it. Mach Number (Half View of Nozzle: Personal Photo) I also got to add my favorite story to my portfolio this week. It is the one I wrote about Hanuman crossing the land bridge to Lan

Procrastination The image above really got me this week. I have been fighting procrastination quite hard recently and it is time to get motivated again. Along this same kind of self improvement ideology, I found this video in the announcements on positive mindsets, and it is nice reminder to be positive and what benefits that can have on a person.

The afternoon sun glanced lazily off the serene surface of the pond. Yudhistira stopped nearby, gazing into the depths; thoroughly entranced by the pureness and clarity of the water. For a foot or so from the bank, he could see a delicate sandy bottom. Here and there a large loach swam lethargically, unperturbed by the presence of Yudhistira. Farther out, the blue intensified to a deep sapphire color and the bottom dropped out into a seemingly bottomless abyss. The Depths The pond itself was nestled deep in the jungle, with dense foliage completely obscuring it from view. Yudhistira and his brothers had stumbled upon it after sweating for hours through the humid forest of vines and fallen teak trees. Upon seeing the water, his brothers had run forward greedily and splashed their faces. The moment their hands broke the surface, the water had cracked with the noise of a splitting glacier. Small tendrils of water began to pull up from the pond. The only ripples in the pond

There were so many different aspects of battle in this portion of the Mahabharata. The one piece that stood out more than others was when Yudhistira fought Salya. This happened very briefly in the story, but I feel that it has great potential. Basically, everyone watched the two square up, and Yudhistira is this mild mannered guy and Salya is very much portrayed as a big brawny guy, but Yudhistira beats him with apparent ease. I think this could be quite the nice place to add a bunch of detail, and make a much better spectacle of it. Great Battle Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link

So the story that most intrigued me this week was the one with 4 of the Pandavas dying and Yudhistira answering riddles to revive them. Basically what happened, was that a large deer scooped up some prayer items from a monk in the woods and the brothers gave chase. Eventually they got really tired and thirsty. Thusly, they decided to look for water and one by one came upon the same pond. When each of them got there, they were issued a warning not to touch the water, but promptly ignored it and died. When Yudhistira finally came around, he headed the warning and ended up answering a large number of riddles from a god that turned out to be his father. His father then granted him a boon of being unrecognizable. This would make a pretty good story involving a vivid description of the pond and the game of wit. Yudhistira Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link

So I finally decided I wanted to start with the Hanuman page. Shocker really, considering my two favorite stories that I've written so far are about him. While looking through the page this time around, I found mention of Bhakti Yoga . Honestly, I thought yoga was yoga so I naturally decided to look deeper. Turns out that Bhakti Yoga is a "spiritual path of loving devotion to a personal Divine." My interpretation of that is that you spend time every day in quiet meditation, relaxing your body and praying to the Divine that resonates most with you. I'm not sure if that is correct, but that's what I understood. This particular yoga was apparently discussed in the Bhagavad Gita . This is a collection of verses and scripts that discuss the interactions of Arjuna and Krishna. This book is apparently a part of the Mahabharata , which is much larger than the version we are reading for class. From the sounds of it, the original Mahabharata is 2000 verses. For re

So this week, I've been in the computer chair a lot and decided to do the deskercise challenge. Being a self conscious person, I really liked the article here , which is specifically non-embarrassing yoga. From this, I will definitely be using the open chest stretch very frequently, as the muscles in my chest tend to get really tight, and this seems to help a lot. Interestingly, the reverse prayer pose was also very calming, and I am not at all opposed to using it some more. The deep breaths provide a nice reminder to relax a little and not stress so much. Classy

I decided to talk to my girlfriend about growth mindset. We've been dating for a long time, so it wasn't a very awkward conversation. She has actually done quite a bit of work towards developing growth mindsets in younger children through her work. She works for the KISS Institute of Practical Robotics, and spends her time teaching kids about robots and programming. She said that one of the more important things is to keep everything interesting. As long as she can keep the kids interested, they are more than willing to tackle new challenges head on, even if they may fall short every once in a while. It is honestly really cool that a company like this one exists right here in Norman. KIPR

This week was really great. We had the first, second, and third snow-days of my college career at OU this last week. I transferred in to the college after the last one happened a couple years ago, so this was a nice surprise.  The bummer was that this last week was also Engineers' Week, meaning a lot of events got cancelled. That's okay though, I still got to decorate the engineering quad with some cool people and we got to go to the fluid dynamics lab on Friday. It is the best time of year to be an engineer, and there is just a wonderful sense of community at every event that goes on. The snows days helped me get a little ahead in some of my classes, but more importantly, I was finally able to catch my breath. It seems like I have been going nonstop since the semester started, so this was a more than welcome break for me. In other news this week, I got to try out the alternative to the story telling assignment. The story planning is interesting to do, because

This week, I found this cool video about sacred trees in India in the stream. It talks about all kinds of different tress and their place in the culture. As someone who really likes plants, this was just neat to watch. Link

Here is a map of Sri Lanka, which is speculated to be the ancient country of Lanka. From here, Ravana would have overseen his kingdom.

In the Mahabharata, Arjuna's acquisition of Gandiva is very briefly mentioned. It was gifted to him from the god Agni, after he burned a forest with the aid of Krishna. They burned the forest for Agni for his own 'well-being,' as he needed the fats of the animals consumed in the inferno. That is more or less all the story has to offer of this incident. Looking further into the tale, I have found several extra details regarding Gandiva, Agni, and Arjuna. Gandiva is a mythical bow with 108 strings, one of them celestial in nature, that thundered when an arrow was loosed from it. With it, Arjuna defeated entire armies, before eventually relinquishing it when his fighting was done. Arjuna is son of Indra, and the reincarnation of Nara (Vishnu's companion). Also of particular interest to me is the fact that his chariot bore a banner of Hanuman, whom I've already had a bit of fun writing about. Apparently, Arjuna met Krishna (Vishnu) in the Khandava Vana, an

Arjuna The main focus of this reading was a large gambling match. It was actually awful to read how carried away they got with the betting. Yudhistira bet away their entire kingdom and even his brothers and wife. Then, the old king took pity and gave it all back, but what did Yudhistira do? He bet again and he and his four brothers were exiled. While exiled, Arjuna acquires a bunch of divine weapons, but also becomes a eunuch. Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link

Arjuna Reading through the Mahabharata, there are a lot of babies being made. So many, that the names of all the couples and the names of their children and children's children are very hard to keep track of as you read. The gist is to build up to the battle later in the book. There are essentially two sets of sons in particular who very much don't like one another. They are the Pandavas and the Kauravas. There are only 5 Pandavas brothers, but 100 Kauravas brothers. The Kauravas are not as popular as the Pandavas, and as such, decide to trick them by building a house of joy. The Pandavas burn it down and secretly escape, successfully faking their demise. Now in hiding, the Pandavas fight deadly Rakshasas, relying almost entirely on Bhima. Eventually, the story brings us to a competition for a bride. One of the Pandavas, Arjuna, strings a bow and hits a target, thus winning Draupadi's hand.  But instead, Draupadi marries all five brothers. Bibliography: Ti

Saraswati So I had seen somewhere mention of a goddess, Saraswati , who is the goddess of all knowledge. In reading about her, I saw the word Dharma , which has been continuously popping up in this class, and I decided to finally read on a little about it. Dharma is essentially a bunch of different behaviors that make the universe possible. It seems to be a pretty abstract concept. But reading through its page, I came to Yudhishthira , who is the son of some god and goddess, but more importantly to me, he took part in the Kurukshetra War . This is also know as the Mahabharata, so I got a little taste of what is to come in our next book. It sounds like a power struggle between two factions for the throne.

In this article , 'Don't Waste Your Time With Bad Resolutions,' Tim Herrera talks about setting goals for yourself the right way. He talks of how we shouldn't set goals based on the ideals of others, but on what we want for ourselves. He then goes into detail on the SMART goals model. This model is the process of making goals smart, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely and I've personally seen just how well it works when utilized properly.  SMART goals are basically a good way of making realistic goals that you can actually accomplish. They may be a stretch, but you can still reach them. They aren't frivolous or vague. They are very specific and have milestones in them for you to reach.  He also talks very briefly about how we shouldn't be overly positive about things, and that a little negativity can help keep us grounded in the present and moving forward. This is a relatively new thing for me to think about. I am probably going to look for s

Link This week, I found out a lot more about what teachers can do to empathize with students. It has become a growing trend in our society that teachers remain distant from their pupils for various reasons. This has led to a loss of connections between the teachers and their students. I believe that doing things like the 'I wish my teacher knew..." will help the teacher connect more with these kids, and be able to teach them in a manner more suited to them. If there isn't a close connection between students and teachers, it is harder to create a positive learning environment. It also tends to lead to a lack of compassion on both ends. If the students and teachers have a closer bond, then they are more able to help one another in rough times. For example, the teacher could be having a really rough day, and the normally rowdy students would be exceptionally well behaved, just to make things a little easier.

Greatness This picture is wonderful, and as someone very passionate about STEM and fantasy, there's no way it wouldn't be my favorite this week. I picked this video, not because it's new to me, but because I have seen it before in a leadership seminar. This is a great piece of animation for demonstrating empathy, and it can really teach a lot. Plus, everyone loves a cute dog.

This past week has been a little better than last week. Rather than getting injured, I instead had a difficult exam, so I guess things have improved. I have also been spending an ungodly amount of time in the machine shop, making parts for my capstone. We have been running the CNC machines ragged to get all our parts ready for this next Wednesday when we have another technical presentation to prepare us for actual testing of our rocket nozzles. This week, I wrote another fun story about Hanuman. I am discovering more and more, that he is really easy for me to write about. He is a very personable character, and has a lot of potential for so many different stories. I also got to read a different version of the Ramayana, and I do believe it was better, although I did not at all like the ending. While the treatment of Sita may have been pretty common when the Ramayana was written, it doesn't come into a modern setting very well. Cultural and social opinions have changed, and ar

For my notifications, I actually left most everything at its default setting. I like getting the updates in my OU email at the end of the week and whenever a grade is posted. I did turn off the discussion notifications, as those can get rather irritating with some of my other courses.

NOTICE: This story has been updated in my portfolio, and can be found  here . Sand flew behind Hanuman as he ran along the thin beach. For an hour now, he had been running as fast as he could with the tide creeping slowly higher on the sandbar. The next island in the chain was in sight, but he still had a fair distance to cover.  Just a little faster , he thought to himself. Putting in a little extra, his pace picked up and his breathing deepened. He had done this for the past few days, going from island to island between the tides on the natural sandbars that formed between them. The sun danced on the edge of the horizon, casting long shadows from the shells strewn about, and playing tricks with his eyes. He put his foot down hard on a mostly buried conch and yowled in pain, stumbling forward and crashing into the ground. Spitting sand and picking himself up, Hanuman chanced a glimpse of a shadow moving in the deep. Fleeting and faint, but definite movement. He started h

The story of Hanuman setting Lanka ablaze contained a lot more detail in this version of the Ramayana. It went to great lengths to explain how he was captured and let loose from his bonds. Also shown in more detail was how Rama and his army crossed to Lanka. Previously, the bridge building hadn't been very specific. The battle at Lanka contained much more detail and felt like almost too much was happening. The author went to great lengths to explain how each individual fight in the battle happened, and each phase of the battle held several fights. The final difference here is what happens after they return. There is another rejection of Sita's purity, and she is exiled and has Rama's sons who return later and recite the Ramayana before their father. This version ends with the return of Rama to heaven with his brothers. Building of the bridge Bibliography: Title : Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists: Ramayana Author : Sister Nivedita Year : 1914 Link

From what I can tell so far, this version of the Ramayana is very similar to Narayan's. The key differences are in the details. Most of the stories in this version have more dialogue, and more development of setting and character. However there are slightly different variations in the plot of the overarching story, such as Ravana taking Sita away by her hair rather than by picking the earth up underneath her. This version is shorter, but it seems more enthralling than the first version I read. There are also stories such as the one with Vali and Rama, that don't get any detailed discussion whatsoever. A story told in this one that I had not seen in the other version of the Ramayana, is the short bit when Hanuman is leaping across islands towards Lanka, and is caught by a sea demon. He grows even larger in size and kills her, before proceeding upon his way to Lanka. Sinhikha Bibliography: Title : Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists: Ramayana Author : Sister Nived