This was another of my favorite professor presentations. Although he, Dr. Mian, was a professor of physics at our school, his cultural knowledge was interesting. His family is from different regions of Bangladesh, which is right next to India. He spoke to us about the folktale tradition of Bangladesh and from his childhood. Like most adults, he vaguely remembered specific fairy/folktales he was told by his mother. He did however explain to us how, similar to the Rama of the Hindi tradition we talked about during Dr. Alles presentation, the tales usually involved spiritual characters, which eventually were taken to be real incantations of their belief systems.
I also learned that in Bengali, one of many languages in Bangladesh, that to say "fairytale" is to say "rupkotha". Broken down, "rup" means 'beauty' and "kotha" means words or speak. Therefore, put together, it translates to beautiful words spoken; precisely what a fairytale is in my mind. We also discussed the typical themes of "rupkotha" which were, good/evil, greed/generosity, and vice/virtue, similar to fairytales in any cultural tradition.
i enjoyed this presentation because he not only taught us things, but we were able to express to him what we'd been learning during the semester. I enjoyed how he always introduced a new slide of his presentation with a question to us. It was a more conversational class than just simply a boring lecture, and that's usually how the class would run. So, i learned more, i think, because of the conversation element we shared as a class.
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