Reading Diary A: Indian Fairy Tales

Here are my favorite stories from the first half of the Indian Fairy Tales unit:

The Lion and the Crane: This story reminds me very much of an Aesop fable that I read in my week 2 reading unit, The Wolf and the Crane. In both stories a crane removes a bone lodged in a predator's throat and asks for a reward for his good deed. Both predators reply that the cranes should be grateful that they stuck their heads in the mouths of predators and were able to bring them back out again without being devoured.While I understand the "be grateful" message, I feel like you deserve at least a "thank you" for helping someone out, especially if the one being helped is an enemy because the helper could have let their enemy suffer but chose to help them instead. I think the lion and the wolf are both very ungrateful themselves for the crane's help.

The Broken Pot: This story also reminds me of another Aesop fable called The Milkmaid and Her Pail. In both stories the main character is daydreaming about what they will do and buy once they sell their sole resource (i.e. a pail of milk in Aesop and a pot full of rice). However, while daydreaming, the two main characters accidentally lose their resource by spilling or breaking it. These stories seek to teach the reader not to count their chickens before they hatch. While you're busy dreaming about the future, you may overlook important details or be careless with your actions. However, it is best to stay focused on the task ahead and not rely too heavily on a certain resource for the root of future success; you never know what might happen. I wonder which of these stories came first. 

The Cruel Crane Outwitted: I'm glad the crane in this story gets a taste of his own medicine. His fatal flaw was his greed; if he had quit while he was ahead, he would have had a happy ending. However, he coveted the crab in the water and it is this crab that ends up taking his life. I think he deserves this fate, though, for tricking the fish and eating them all (although, I don't like the graphic mental imagery of a crab decapitating a crane. Yeesh).  BUT the fish should have known better than to trust the crane. One fish made it back to safety, one time. If it were me, I would have wanted some kind of proof that the previous fish had made it to the pond alive and were still alive there.

The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal: Dr. Gibbs was right! This is a wonderful fairy tale! I love that the jackal tricked the tiger into going back into the cage trap. I couldn't understand what the jackal was trying to accomplish by pretending to be confused but his plan worked perfectly. What I like about this story is that the trickster used his cunning to save an innocent person, in this case the Brahman. Usually, tricksters use their cunning to trick innocent people into making themselves vulnerable so that they may be devoured or taken advantage of. This is a great story and I would highly recommend that everyone read it, even if you don't read the whole unit. Just take a minute to read the one story and you won't regret it.

The Jackal tricks the Tiger into going back into the cage
(John D. Batten)