Peter's India Blog

I really liked reading   Just the Language  article. I think it's a truly fascinating and yet concise article, full of writing tips and wisdom. Like it was mentioned in the article, writers really don't know where the writings are going to take them when they start writing: "they find it peculiar that for my novels I need to know, and I need to know not just the ending, but every significant event in the main characters’ lives." It is so true, but it is difficult to know all that farther ahead as a writer. Certainly, I've had difficulty in recognizing and being aware of every significant event in the main characters' lives because I'm usually busy constructing the overall plots and characters' personalities. Wow.. This truly is a conscientious way of writing a story from the beginning: "When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it." I think this kind of ...

I'm always been fond of reading Jataka tales. In fact, these collections of Jataka tales have been my favorite kind of reading for this semester because their plots are very interesting with lots of suspense and rich visual details. Monkeys look the most alike with humans, and they are usually the symbol of wisdom in many Indian epic stories. I liked all the readings in Reading A of Inayat's twenty Jataka tales, but one story that particularly stood out in my mind was the story of Monkey-Bridge. Monkey, including the wise god Hanuman, often has taken the role of clever, wise, and smart animal in Indian and Hindu epics. The story begins with a giant-like monkey who ruled eighty-thousand monkeys in Himalayan mountains. Wow.. Eighty-thousand monkeys are a lot and I can't even conceive how many monkeys that the giant monkey ruled in the cold, steep Himalayan mountains. I really like this very detailed, vivid, and full of image description of the monkeys' habitat: ...