Reading Notes: Ganesha Goes to Lunch Part C

• While it is sad to see the abused state that the snake ended up in, you can't say he did not deserve it.
• Imagine the grand place the hermits found as something too good to be true. It could all be an illusion or curse. How often does my mind wander to these tragic ideas?
• These Brahmins hanging around Guha sound like the mean, old, evangelical Christians seemingly everywhere. I though Hinduism was more open-minded about how one could worship the Gods. Even some of the gods themselves do not seem to care about this. I suppose in earlier times, like many things, this was partially used to control people.
• The image of a world tree where the three Gods make up it and all worlds are interconnected: it is like Yggdrasil.
• I guess the story of Guha really proves how Hinduism is more open-minded about how one worships, especially in his case to where kicking the statue of Shiva every day was considered worship.
• I still blame Gautama for his wife, Ahalya, choosing someone else who could fulfill her sexual desires. I thought one of the aspects of a fulfilled life was Kama. He is a terrible husband if he cannot devote even a little time and attention to his wife.
• In Narayan's version of the Ramayana, it seemed to have been implied that Ahalya did not know that the Gautama that came to her was actually Indra in disguise. He was also cursed to be covered in female genitalia instead of male in that version. Is it more acceptable, for some reason, to talk about or mention male genitalia over female? Is one more insulting than the other?
• What is the more cruel fate: to be burned alive or turned to stone? Either way you would be stuck with your consciousness intact and would be in that state for at least a thousand years. The only way you would come back would be to have dust kicked onto you by a very specific person.
• But the previous bullet brings up a though for the conditions of the curses and what break them: do these people who say these curses know the future and essentially set a minimum time for these people to be cursed? Do these curses affect the future in that it creates a specific set of invents? Or do some of these things become fulfilled or broken by pure chance? Sometimes they all seem like cases of deus ex machina.
• Hanuman, a monkey-man, disguised himself as a cat in Lanka. That almost sounds like a lemur or an animal right out of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• Imagine Bjorn the bearman coming to aid Rama in battle.
• I get this image of Vishswamitra and Vasistha as little kids. Vishswamitra has everything, and Vasistha has almost nothing but a new toy. Vishswamitra greedily demands for the toy despite all that he has.

 A lemur, probably what Hanuman looked like disguised as a "cat"

Web Source: onkelramirez1 on Pixabay

Bibliography. Ganesha Goes to Lunch by Kamla K. Kapur, link to reading guide.