Blindness in Ramayana
Temporal Blindness is where we are “time blinded” to what actually is going on in life due to a focus on what is going on right now at this moment. It is as if we put something major important in the back of our minds and then our actions are greatly dependent on that important thing we put in the back of our mind. In the Ramayana, Ravana is temporally blind when he decides to capture Sita, which ultimately leads to his death.
When Rama, his beloved wife Sita, and his helpful brother Lakshmana are forced to exile for fourteen years, they encounter many demons. Rama is ultimately put to the test when he has to find his beloved wife that has been captured by the demon herself, Soopanaka. She teases Rama and wants him to leave Sita, in favor of her. Soopanaka then runs to her brothers who ultimately fight for revenge against Rama and his brother. Ravana then is interested in Sita; by the way his sister Soopanaka has described her. So he then disguises himself as a beautiful deer and he then seizes on Sita and captures her and takes her to his home, Lanka. The abduction of his beautiful wife causes him to adventure out and find her.
Rama goes through a series of sadness when he can no longer think of Sita and what she is going through. “When he saw foaming, frothing, reddish floodwater rushing down the mountain, bearing and rolling along uprooted trees, he was reminded of Sita being carried of...
Looking through the spectacles of time reflects the changes in our lifestyle and culture through the years and how it has made us into the people that we are today. Every day we are stepping into a footstep that is bigger than our own, living lives that have been created and inspired by our ancestors that have come before us.
There are a lot of good husbands out there, but there are also a lot of bad ones too. A good husband needs to be honest, loyal, and kind. Janie has to marry her first husband, Logan, because her grandma made her because he has money. Then she ran off with Joe who becomes the mayor of the first black town. After Joe dies she marries Tea Cake, who is younger than her. Which one of the husbands is the best for Janie.
I'd like to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as the odyssey of one man's search for identity. Try this scenario: the narrator is briefly an academic, then a factory worker, and then a socialist politico. None of these "careers" works out for him. Yet the narrator's time with the so-called Brotherhood, the socialist group that recruits him, comprises a good deal of the novel. The narrator thinks he's found himself through the Brotherhood. He's the next Booker T. Washington and the new voice of his people. The work he's doing will finally garner him acceptance. He's home.
prove to be blind when it comes to the world they are in. By looking
The short story "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver is about a woman who has a blind friend who comes to visit her and her husband. Although the husband has, technically, normal vision he is in the beginning of this story the one who is "blind." Through the husband’s words and actions when he is dealing with Robert, the blind man, we can see that the husband does not "see" or understand what Robert’s blindness means or how it changes or does not change him as a human being. At first Robert makes the husband very uncomfortable, for the husband does not know what to say or do around the blind visitor. As the story progresses, we can see a change in the husband; he seems to be able to see Robert as a person and not just as a blind man.
Simply, Kim posits, that since these white men withhold themselves from lashing out in violence towards the black boys in the ring, they instead, watch as the young black males harm each other as a means of self pleasure. This can be equated to an individual masturbating to pornographic images or film. As the white townsmen watch the Battle Royal, porn, they begin to get aroused until they climax from viewing the last black boy standing in the ring.
In The Chosen by Chaim Potok, vision is a metaphor for perceptive growth. During Book One, Reuven is naïve, and he fails to see through the eyes of others. However, after he meets Danny, the two boys progress into Book Two with more empathetic and mature eyes. In Book Three, at the end of the novel, the two boys – now young men – have grown perceptively to see and understand the paradox of the significance and insignificance of their existences.
Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" depicted the interaction between a narrow minded husband, with a limited understanding of the world around him, and a blind visitor, named Robert, that proved to be the catalyst that dramatically changed the husband's view on the world, while they went from being strangers to becoming friends. In the beginning of the story, the husband disliked the concept of his wife bringing her blind friend over to stay since he never had met a blind person before and did not understand it. However, as the story progresses, the husband, through interaction and observation, begins to dispel his fears and misconceptions of Robert and his blindness. With the help of Robert, the husband gains a revelation that changed his view and opened his eyes to the world.
The anaphora of blindness reveals itself in the two African American novels, Native Son by Richard Wright, written before the civil rights era, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, written in the mid 1950’s. They are spliced in an effort to center in on the American racial discrimination and segregation through both Wright’s and Ellison’s imagery to show how white supremacists forced African Americans to live a life without progression. Not only are whites responsible for the lack of progression within the black race, but blacks themselves are partially responsible for their own quality of life. Both races have chosen to turn a blind eye and neglect those who are oppressed. Ellison and Wright both depict blindness as a rebellious point of view that plays an important role in the everyday struggle for African Americans against white supremacists. Blindness is the state of refusing to see someone as an individual. The state of being blind is not only exclusive to whites; black and white individuals can both jointly share the state of blindness. Whites tend to see blacks as a whole, rather than each being an individual, making them blind. Blacks are seen as blind because they allow themselves to be mistreated by their oppressors.
In his essay An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man, William Apess talks about the incompatibility of being a good Christian while still discriminating between races. He argues that this social hypocrisy is not supported by the Biblical text, or by Christian teachings. It is Apess’ belief that if God were to love white people as much as they believe, he wouldn’t have created fifteen colored people for every white one. He goes on to remind his white Christian audience, that it has been the white race the one who has committed the most terrible crimes in the history of mankind. Apess places emphasis on the fact the neither Jesus nor any of his apostles or disciples were white skinned. He also argues the right of the white man to control and subjugate the other races, more
When defining the word blindness, it can be interpreted in various ways. Either it can be explained as sightless, or it can be carefully deciphered as having a more complex in-depth analysis. In the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago depicts and demonstrates how in an instant your right to see can be taken in an instant. However, in this novel, blindness is metaphorically related to ‘seeing’ the truth beyond our own bias opinions.
The film “Sita Sings the Blues” and “Ramayana the Epic” are two versions of the Ramayana but were portrayed in different ways. “Sita Sings the Blues” was presented by Nina Paley based on Valmiki 's version of the Ramayana and she showed the side that many people don 't know and fail to accept about the Ramayana, Sitas side of the story. She doesn 't portray Rama to be the ideal husband although he goes through the trouble of saving Sita. In the film “Sita Sings the Blues” Nina Paley did not show Lakshmana throughout the whole journey of Rama leaving Ayodhya and trying to finding Sita. Also, Rama himself ends up killing Ravana which was different in the film “Ramayana the Epic.” In the film “Ramayana the Epic,” Rama was portrayed as the ideal
People can be “blinded” to the truth. The answer to their question or solution to their problem may have been obvious. Yet, they could not "see" the answer. They were blinded to the truth. Associations have been made between being blind and enlightened. A blind person is said to have powers to see invisible things. They "see" into the future. The blind may not have physical sight, but they have another kind of vision. In Sophocles' King Oedipus, Teiresias, the blind prophet, presents the truth to King Oedipus and Jocasta. Oedipus has been blinded to the truth his whole life. When he does find the truth, he loses his physical vision. Because of the truth, Oedipus blinds himself. Jocasta was blind to the true identity of Oedipus. Even when she found out the truth, she refused to accept it. In this case, those who are blind ultimately do have a higher vision - the truth.
Parvana is becoming anxious and concerned about her father (P.35 “Where was her father? Did he have a soft place to sleep? Was he cold? Was he hungry?”). Fatana (Parvana’s mother) wants her husband back desperately (P.37 “We don’t have time to wait for tea. Parvana and I are going to get your father out of jail”) Parvana and her mother started to search for their father at the prison. When they arrive, the guards turn them down and beat them. Parvana and her mother return home bruised and battered (P.46 “Mother’s feet were so bad from the long walk that she could barely make it into the room. Parvana had been so preoccupied with her own pain and exhaustion, she hadn’t given any thought to what mother had been going through.”) Parvana's mother is feeble and languishing of poignancy over her husband; the family is struggling to sustain a living since women are forbidden to go outside their home and there is no man to help make money for the family (P.
Suddendorf, T. & Corballis, M.C. (2007) The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? [On-line] Available from: http://www.memorylab.org/Files/Corballis_MTT_BBS_2007.pdf, [accessed 5th May 2011].