I took some notes during my reading of ‘Kāliya, the Snake’. I don’t know a super coherent way to organize my thoughts here, so I am going to separate them by bullet points.

• “Serpent worship is among the world’s oldest and most widespread religious practices.” This surprised me. Maybe it’s because I was raised, and the snake is a symbol of the Devil in Christian/Catholic ideologies. It might be because my dad has an ungodly fear of snakes, so I’ve always seen them as something to avoid and not to worship. Maybe I’ve been living under a rock – either way, it’s cool. The only snake-like God or deity I can imagine is Geb from Ancient Egypt.
• “Then he came upon the river Yamunā, whose waves were tossing about as if she were laughing, throwing patches of foam on the banks.” I really like the use of personification to describe the river Yamunā. I firmly believe one of the fundamental problems with us as a species is how we stopped looking at the natural world as its own being. I don’t know if that makes any sense. To most people words like ‘lake’, ‘river’, ‘tree’, ‘mountain’, etc. are just that – words. They are void of personality and I’d be willing to bet for a lot of people, placing humanlike behaviors on these words would be considered weird or hippy-esque. As a species, it almost seems like we stopped trying to understand the natural world – we replaced that connection with the hellbent desire to conquer it. We stopped adapting to Earth, now Earth has to adapt to us. Unfortunately I think its too late to turn the tides on humanity (singular) we view our planet.
• “How can I, a mere woman, describe you? . . . Since silly women and miserable creatures are to be pitied by the virtuous, please forgive this wretched creature, you who are eminent among the forgiving!” Once again, gross gross GROSS. It’s so crazy to write a story and have a woman just blatantly say this. I’m assuming this story was passed down orally in Hindu for centuries, so for centuries these ideals were fed to young boys and girls. I know that this note isn’t very constructive as its saying somethings thats already been said and will probably be said for the rest of our course from time to time – but golly, this undisguised degradation of women as an entirety is so baffling and strange.