Mahabarat

Sometimes you get the feeling that the Universe, or maybe just one of your ancestors... and for me I always go to my mother, is trying to tell you something.

Itw as a while ago that I turned on Arjun.. a UTV cartoon which Disney did have something to do with after all, and watched it on my own. I then told Noah about it and we watched it together.

My favorite scene was when he kills the fish while looking at it's shadow. It was so cool that I started googling Arjun and learned about the Mahabarat.

It turns out for that particular scene... the cartoon was way cooler than the original story.

I won't say it's my favorite cartoon. I actually thought it was weird because at the end.. Arjun fights like Bruce Lee. And the Indian characters are drawn... well anime was a big influence you can just tell. Especially when you look at old artwork depicting the Mahabarat. Some Indians look more like East Asians.. but it was weird to hvae everyone looking like that.

Anyway, Noah loves the movie and we are watching it again.

Then... it turns out that I had bought a book from the library, "Once Upon a Time in the Future"  by A.K. Kulshreshth. I had brought it to Florida to read. I wanted to bring a book I could lose and not care about. I didn't even finish it... or even read it really.

I only started reading it now. Turns out that is all about the Mahabarat. I only knew what the hell I was reading because I had already seen Arjun.. and I had already looked at a lot of the mythology on Wikipedia.

Reading that book now.. I realize it is a lot like what I was trying to do with Kung Fu and Love. And mean... if you put those two books together there are a lot of similarities. While I'm sure he had a better support team... I mean an editor and he worked with an illustrator.. I mean I've never heard of the book. I want to suspect it is one of those fringe type novels. The author live sin Singapore. I mean yes he is at a higher level than me..... also this book thing also seems to be something he is doing for fun. He is really an engineer... but still I had never read anything like Kung Fu and Love, until I read this book. It was a bit inspiring.

So that's not the only thing. At Outside the Box we only got to watch two performances. One was classical Indian Dance. The teacher performed by herself. Much like me. It was just her and music. It made mne realize using pre recorded music could really carry you far when you are dealing with large speakers and your drummer would otherwise be a 6 year old.

Plus she showed me through this classical dance that... well skill is very important. It was interesting because a lot of the dance was in the face. Amazingly so. I'd never seen something like that, and I ended up having a conversation with her students. I wanted to collaborate with her, but I lost the paper with her contact. But in a way, the stuff I'm working  for the Lantern Festival is already partially inspired by her dance. Why? THe choreography was both traditional.. but she said it was a new dance.

Also, while watching her, I thought, "If she was not so good, the moves she was doing through out the whole dance... would look ridiculous." What I mean is that she wasn't doing back flip after back flip. Every move she did, theoretically everyone could do. That is to say they could do some copy of it, although not well. But it takes years of practice and true artistic flare to make that move into something that people will watch and be drawn into another world and stare fascinatingly at. Basically the type of Kung Fu I do is pretty similar because it is not like we do fancy move after fancy move. There are only a few acrobatic moves if any per form.

But what I am going to do for the lantern festival is actually something completely different.

I choreographed new moves. But more on that later. Maybe in another blog.. the Chinatown one.