Week 10 Reading Diary: Fables of Bidpai

This week I will be reading The Tortoise and the Geese and Other Fables of Bidpai by Maude Dutton. Link. This post will cover Part A.

The Tortoise and the Geese, courtesy of Yesterday's Classics

• Once again, I am already familiar with some of these stories. Some of them seem to be very common children's stories.
• The stories that I haven't seen before are even shorter than the ones I have. They are just a few sentences warning against things like greed. 
• I like the story of the Ape and the Carpenter, people really shouldn't interfere with other peoples livelihoods. 
• The Poor Man is a tragic character. I don't think he did anything wrong, he was only dreaming of the future. I don't see the point of this story except to make me sad. 
• The Partridge and thew Crow was a great story about being proud of your own identity. 
• The Hunter, the Fox, and the Leopard also confuses me. What was so wrong about the hunter trying to capture the Fox? if anything the greedy leopard should have been the one to die in this story. 
• I'm surprised that so few of these stories focus on respect to your elders. I wonder if Indians at the time didn't care about this, or it was so ingrained in culture that it didn't need to be said?
• Another story focused on remembering your place in life. I wonder if this is because of the Indian caste system? 
• This is the first story that expressly takes place out of India, in Persia. 
• The story of the Apes also confuses me. They don't get their comeuppance after they bury and glow worm and kill the bird trying to help them. 
• Most of these stories focus on not being greedy. This must have been very important to Indian culture when these stories were written. 
• This story mentions guns, so surely some of these aren't ancient proverbs. Or maybe they have been updated.

Thanks for reading!