Alternate entry title: Multiculturalism lite.<\/p>\n
When I was in fourth grade or so, I read several Classics Illustrated<\/a> comics (see also Classics Illustrated covers<\/a>). I think that was the form in which I \"read\" A Tale of Two Cities<\/cite>, Master of the World<\/cite>, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court<\/cite>, and other canonical works of Western literature, most of which (sadly) I never got around to reading the originals of.<\/p>\n But those weren't the first great works of literature I read in comic-book form. When I was much younger, I encountered a set of comic-book versions of classical Indian works; I think my father's ex-wife had worked for a company that distributed (or possibly just sold) them here in California. It was a series called Amar Chitra Katha<\/a>, published by India Book House. That was my first exposure to Krishna, the Ramayana<\/cite>, and the Mahabharata<\/cite>. Those are still all jumbled together in my head—those blue-skinned holy guys (though nobody ever seemed to notice they were blue); those kings with white beards and golden crowns; Hanuman the monkey king; the villainous ten-headed demon Ravana; the five Pandava princes and their shared wife Draupadi; Krishna; Yama the lord of death; Rama and his wife Sita; exile in the forest; war chariots; elephants; lots of names I could never keep straight; a bow nobody but Arjuna could string. . . . Good stuff, and I remember a surprising number of things about it given that I was probably six or eight years old when I read 'em. But I don't think I had any real sense of them being separate works about different people.<\/p>\n Anyway, now you, too, can read the definitive comic-book version of the Ramayana<\/a><\/cite> online, thanks to AskAsia<\/a>, \"a K-12 resource of the Asia Society.\"<\/p>\n Perhaps someday I'll read the real thing.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alternate entry title: Multiculturalism lite. When I was in fourth grade or so, I read several Classics Illustrated comics (see…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}