It Always Comes Back to the Ramayana

As if I don't have enough to fret over right now, I'm devoting time to looking at some of the thousands of pictures I've taken overseas.  I do need to finish prepping for tomorrow, but I'll go ahead and throw this one picture up.  On our trip to India last year we made it back to the sacred caves at Ellora, which the students liked even though we didn't have nearly enough time.  While there are pictures taken of me overseas, it is rare that I ask someone to take my picture; in this case I did.  Situated above me is a stone carving depicting scenes from the Ramayana, which I, of course, knew about and which my students figured out.  One of the students, parroting my own words, said, "It always comes back to the Ramayana!"  Yes, my friends, it does.  Now, if I could ever finish my damn book (manuscript) on, among other epics, the Ramayana, there might be more truth to those words.  This fall I need to figure out my trips for the following year.  One of them will almost certainly be a return to Zanzibar in January, but that still leaves me with one or two others.  I'm hoping to get back to India in spring 2019, although the nature of the trip is still up in the air.  I'm tempted to repeat the COR 270 Heroines & Heroes Ramayana-themed trip (which would include another swing through Sri Lanka), but I may also refashion it as a junior level trip, either as a version of my COR 330 Dar al-Islam: Yemen class, only focusing on the history and role of Islam in India, or maybe as a COR 320 Human Rights course looking at the complexity of human rights as a secular/philosophical construct as they interact with the Hindu caste system and the Islamic sense of human rights.

Not a bad picture, although I was hoping for more of the Ramayana and less of me.