Indian Epics by Reid

The Jataka Tales are already pretty short, so turning them into microfictions is pretty simple. I did one of these previously with the Girly-face elephant story, but this time I wanted to revisit a different story. 6 WORD STORY Coming together, we are the strongest. TWITTERATURE @QuailCatcher2020: These damn quails are working together! I swear they'll break one day and I'll be victorious again! Author's note: The Quarrelsome Quails by Noor Inayat is a story all about working together even in stressful situations. The premise is simple, and I wanted to think of what an angry twitter poster would post when dealing with these quarrelsome quails. Blue-headed quail dove

Moving on to more of Noor Inayat's Jataka Tales, I wanted to go back to one I didn't really get to focus on in my other notes, The Master's Test. In this quick story, a master asks his students to go steal money for him because he's too weak to do so himself. Specifically, he mentions not letting anyone see you when you do it, and make sure to do no harm. Some students, seeing as they will do no harm go out right away, but one remains. he is worried that it is impossible for no one to watch as he himself will be watching. The teacher is happy that he truly understands, and that he has passed his test. By watching themselves, they all go on to live happy lives. This story is one of the more impactful (to me) of all the Jataka Tales. We can't rely on others to keep our lives in check, we have to focus on ourselves for that. Keeping on our own path without hurting the lives of others is a hard thing to keep in balance, but stories like these can teach that to child...

The Jataka Tales have been some of my favorite readings from this semester, so I wanted to go back to some of the authors I hadn't read yet and see how they went! This time I'd like to focus on The Quarrelsome Quails, a story I had read a rendition of from another student earlier in the semester. In this story, a man is catching quails in large groups with his net with ease, as the quails have no way to escape. The quails had a plan though, at least the king quail did. If all the quails flew in the same direction, they could lift the net and escape! And so they did, and they left the net in the thorns for the man to spend lots of time untangling it. One time, however, a few quails got in a fight an could not work together, so they were caught. All the quails that followed the lead of the king escaped. In this story, we can see that the power of working together is extremely important. It is also important to follow in the words of an experienced elder, in this case the king...