Reading Diary A Week 14: Pattanaik

1. It's interesting to think about people's perspectives on what is strange being influenced by what they were raised with. We talk a lot about that in my anthropology class.

2. I loved the story about Ganesha running around his parents three times. It was an interesting insight into the matters of subjectivity and the importance of it in life. 

3. The importance of empathy when analyzing or studying another culture is rightly emphasized in this video. We talk about ethnocentrism and how detrimental it is to cross-cultural interactions and I like the way this video analyzes and breaks that down in the example of Hinduism. 

4. I love the idea of divinity being formless and people creating forms for the divine in order to understand it. It's an interesting idea and it shows how complicated and abstract our forms of understanding and communicating are.

5. The story of the two warrior goddesses who did not marry because it would domesticate them was very interesting.

6. The idea of subjective truths was my favorite part of the first video. 

7. Narayan's sleep cycle and the idea of the rebirth of the universe is very interesting. It's an interesting insight into the lives of Hindus. I like the idea that it explains the urgency in some cultures and the lack of it in others. 

8. It's also interesting to think about the question of whether or not something exists if it is not consciously observed or thought of. And I love the question of whether or not we create the world with our observations or if the universe created us.

Statue of Vishnu: Image found on Wikimedia Commons