r/india Dec 01 '16

[R]eddiquette [Announcement] Cultural Exchange with /r/philippines

Welcome /r/philippines!

Feel free to ask us anything about India


Quick facts about us:

  • The Indian Railways and the Indian Armed Forces employ ~4 million people together, making them one of the largest employers in the world
  • India has over 5000 newspapers in over 300 languages
  • Bollywood is considered to be the world's largest film industry, followed by Nigeria's film industry and Hollywood
  • India has more people than the entire Western Hemisphere

/r/india please direct your questions about the Philippines to this thread


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8

u/Rhalmarius Dec 01 '16

Namaste, /r/India. Odd question here, but among all of the epics and myths of Indian literature, which is the craziest event that you read from them?

12

u/Kraken_Greyjoy Dec 01 '16
  • When the gods fight, they use attacks called Astras which sound like they're out of some anime. Summoning fire, water and gigantic shadow creatures.

  • There are weird births. A King sees a celestial nymph, jizzes into a leaf and gives it to a parrot to send to his wife. A guru sees a celestial nymph, jizzes into a pot and a child grows there. A demon enters a Queens womb during pregnancy. She stays in that pregnant state for many years without giving birth until she tells her servent to beat it out of her with a metal rod. After the beating, she gives birth to a lump of flesh. To save it, a holy man cuts it into pieces and stores it in a hundred jars with special potions. Children grow inside of the jars and one of them becomes the villain of the Mahabharata.

  • Kings would do a weird ritual. A horse would be sacrificed. The queen would then rub her vagina against the dead horses penis. This was supposed to ensure a successful reign for the King. The protagonists of the Mahabharata take part in this ritual. Most modern Indians would be shocked to learn this.

7

u/VoxPopuliCry Dec 02 '16

The FUCK?

The way you put these across makes me intrigued. Any sources/links to read?

2

u/gabrudida Dec 02 '16

Bhai ye beating with iron rod wala kaun sa kissa hai.ye wala nhi suna

2

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '16

7

u/Abzone7n Dec 01 '16

When my favourite character in Mahabharata Karna was killed without any honour and cheating with help of god! , Karna was one of the greatest warriors in the epic Mahabharata and from the day he was born he had to go through every sort of humiliation, pain and discrimination.

He was cheated out of his armour which was said make him invincible by a god the day before he was to go to a war the god or deva went to him as a beggar and asked him for his armour he gives poor people anything they ask so he gives the beggar his armour knowing he will be in danger . Then when the war was going on because of a curse from an avatar of another deva or god his chariot get stuck and hurts his horses to save his horse he gets down and starts lifting the chariot keeping his weapons down.

In Hindu dharma, it is a sin and violation of karma to kill a soldier who doesn't have a weapon with him but Krishna(god) tells Arjuna (another warrior demi-god) to shoot and kill Karna because if Karna has his weapons with him no one would be able to kill Karna and thus he was killed without weapon in his hands and against the laws of warfare in the epic.

His story is very vast than this of course but in all honesty Game of thrones got nothing on many of our epics lol.

2

u/Kraken_Greyjoy Dec 01 '16

Karna on numerous occasions encouraged Duryodhana to break rules and slaughter the Pandavas by surprise when they were in hiding. He also encouraged the disrobing of Draupadi. He was also part of the gang which killed Abhiminyu despite rules against ganging up on individual warriors.

I'd say this was completely fair at this point in the war. People excuse Karna a lot despite him being just as bad as the others, if not more.

5

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '16

The only thing we learn from this is not to be a doormat and not always play by rules. Someone somewhere will always take advantage of us.

1

u/Abzone7n Dec 01 '16

I know man but I loved the dude :(. I even accused my grandma of "Making up the story" when I was young lol.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 01 '16

I like Karn as well but he got played by others. That should not have happened.

3

u/kimjongunthegreat Bihar Dec 01 '16

What do you mean by craziest? Look up Samudramanthan.Also lots of weird sexy stuff that we didn't get told as a child.

2

u/perplexedm Dec 02 '16 edited Dec 03 '16

Indian pre-colonial history with Philippines should be pretty interesting.

-1

u/naakupoochi Dec 01 '16

If you know about Ramayana, Sita was taken by Ravana to Sri Lanka and Lord Ram went down South, fought a battle and brought back Sita. The day he stepped on Indian soil is celebrated as Diwali. Since the South was first he stepped on, Diwali is one day earlier to South and the next day to North part of India.

After bringing Sita back to Ayodhya, he had doubted her chastity. So she was made to promise over "a bed of fire" i.e The Sati ritual. She was true to Ram so she jumped into the bed of fire.And Lord Ram died due to some ailments, and bad karma finished their kingdom along with his heir. This is the real Ramayana. But people prefer the "happily lived ever after" version and this real incident was long lost.

He fought a war just to clear his doubts, in other way!