We do learn from Kids.

While speaking about my earlier blog on Leela and her question, Chandramouli mentioned that children could and did bring knowledge by their questions and actions. He spoke of Nachiketa and Dhruva and their impact. The conversation between young Nachiketa and God of death Yama is the basis for Kathopanishad. The story of Dhruva, (I remember my grandmother telling me this story) is about a 5 year old's great penance till God Vishnu pleased with his steadfastness appeared before him and blessed him.

In his opinion children must be encouraged to ask questions and should be allowed to find answers by themselves instead of lecturing them. Interesting idea, I hope he elaborates on this sometime. He retired as a schoolteacher in the US.

This suddenly reminded me about the time when Rohini told me that amma had read her the story of 'Rama and Ramana'. I tried to correct her by telling her that it was Ravana, but she insisted that it was 'Ramana'. I let it go with a smile and probably let go of a very important truth that should have been apparent to me then.

I believe it is in the nature of things that while existence of Rama (Pure Goodness) and Ravana (Total Evil) said to be in Tretayuga could be a possibility, I feel most of us in Kaliyuga fall into being something in between, in effect, a Ramana.

I belong to the cadre who having heard repeatedly that God is beyond our comprehension give up on trying to understand God and his inscrutable ways! Let alone the expanding universe I am challenged by our own solar system. Imagine his placement of the sun and the planets in such a way that I am here to write about it.

Having said that, I am constantly engaged in trying to understand his ways as it applies to us here on earth during our short stay here. I am tempted to use the statisticians approach and say that we are highly dependent on the normal distribution curve he seems to have applied. Well, most of the time.
I feel that in his creation there is normally a balance between different levels of Ramana in equal numbers.



Ramana ...................................... .ramanA



It is possible that there is less of Rama and more of Ravana in the mixture.
In which case the graph would be somewhat as below!


Ramana .............................. .ramanA

Comments

Anonymous said…
When Rohini visited us in Chicago long time back, she was talking about the efforts of your mother-in-law to teach her Hebbar Tamil, and there was some confusion between 'Maampalu'(Mango) and 'Maapulle'(son-in-law)!

Vague recall of a Kannada drama written by Bellave Narahari Shastri (Asthana Vidwan, contemporary of my great-grand father, they knew each other from their days in the Mysore Palace) - the minister wants to teach a lesson to the king who refuses to allow the princess to marry the minister's son, and brings an illiterate guy from some village and tries to pass him off as a great scholar. When that guy sees a picture of Ravana in the palace, he exclaims "Rabhana, Rabhana"!

The king is very puzzled by this, and the minister explains that the scholar has combined the names of all the three brothers - Ravana, Kumbhakarna, and Vibheeshana - in that single word, and the king is highly impressed!
(That is a SCARY combination:- Nidhi)

Sriram.

Forgot about the story Amma tells about Jayaram reading the Ramayana in Kannada to his grandmother - apparently he said that "Raamara pattabhishekakke agasarella bandiddaru", and the puzzled lady said that it could not be "agasa"(Washerman) and should be "arasa",(King) but Jayaram would not budge!

Did I ever send you the mp3 of some family recordings from more than 40 years ago? My cousin Srinath is narrating the Ramayana in Hebbar Tamil (with some Hindi words thrown in), and when it came to the section of everyone returning from Lanka back to Ayodhya, Prasan asks him how they came back. Srinath says that they came back by plane! So the follow up question was what happened to the Pushpaka Vimana, and pat came the reply that it was broken and therefore could not be used!

Regards,

Sriram

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