The Blog

I like books. It has come to my attention that I tend to check-out too many books from the library in order to write research papers. In the era of the internet books have become a dreaded source when it comes to writing papers. Most students would rather print articles from the internet & use them as their sources. Not me, I prefer a book. Think about it--would you trust someone more who had enough information to write a small 20 page article or someone who had enough information to fill an entire book? Granted I geek my life away be purusing the pages of books that have a lot of useless information, but I can feel my mind expanding. This sometimes makes writing papers difficult for me though as I feel like I have trouble limiting and narrowing my topic.

Currently I have two research projects in the works. The first is on the pilgrimage site Kataragama which is in the south of Sri Lanka. Kataragama is unique as people from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam (and sometimes Christians who want to figure out what the heck is going on there) come to worship. There is so much information on this site that I have been feeling overwhelmed. I wish to explore what this site says about the conflict that is going on in Sri Lanka right now--is the site proof that the conflict is not religious/ethnic based? Well, there are proofs from either side of that debate so it is hard to say. Seems to me that politics will get anything involved in order to make a their side of the case. Perhaps the conflict is not about ethnicity and religion, but that won't stop the government from attempting to make the common man think that is what it is about. I have been so caught up in the pages of my books about Sri Lanka that sometimes I look up and expect to see Sri Lanka's landscape stretching out before me. How much easier it would be to write this paper if I was there. I wish I had enough money so that I could kidnap my father & and we could go together and travel there.

My other paper is for my English Literature class and so I hope (I say hope because I have not gotten the topic approved yet) to do it on the Ramayana, which is a Hindu epic about the god Rama and his wife Sita who gets kidnapped by the ten headed demon Ravana and taken to the island of Lanka. Of course Rama is more than he seems, he is an avatar of Vishnu (one of the main gods of Hinduism), and he has come to once more preserve the order of the world by getting rid of Ravana. (Vishnu is the god of preservation...see there are three main gods in Hinduism: Brahman, the creator, Shiva the destroyer, and Vishnu the preserver--and Vishnu has many avatars [forms] because the world needs preserved a lot). Anyways, I want to explore the Ramayana because it was mainly a text that was passed down orally. Much of India is not literate and so their understanding of the text is through the oral tradition. There are Hindu festivals that celebrate and reinact parts of the story of Rama and so this is how many learn the story. I want to explore how much, if at all, this changes the meaning of the text.

Alright, so mostly I wrote this entry because I needed to brainstorm my topics a bit & it is easier to do when I can write freely about them. Hope I did not bore my few beloved readers.