But I was not an easy audience. I would ask for motives, reasons, explanations. One of the better known stories in the Ramayanam is the story of Vali. Raman, the hero who can do no wrong, promises his friend Sugreevan that he will help him kill Sugreevan's evil and lascivious brother Vali. Sugreevan challenges Vali to a wrestling match and is being roundly beaten when Raman, standing behind a tree, kills Vali with an arrow. Not only is this a cowardly way to end a fight, it is selfish as well -- Raman needs Sugreevan's help to get to Lanka where he will strut his heroic stuff. This was something I challenged every adult I knew to explain.
I got the usual evasive answers: Raman was God-incarnate, he knew what he was doing; the ends sometimes justify the means; Raman needed to get to Lanka, Vali was small-cheese; Vali, by his past deeds had lost his chances with God.
The best explanation I got was this: The wrestling match between Vali and Sugreevan represents the fight that goes in every one's soul between the part of him that is ghoulish (Vali) and the part of him that is angelic (Sugreevan). In such a fight, the only way to banish the evil thoughts is not to reason logically (Vali vs. Sugreevan) but to go outside the box. Raman goes outside of reason and simply kills the evil thoughts.
The moral is that "right" and "wrong" are not subject to reason -- you avoid doing the "wrong" things even if they make good sense.
So why does this myth and its moral strike me now? One of my colleagues, recently moved to Norman, bought Oklahoma tags even though his Colorado ones hadn't yet expired. When I moved here from Ohio, I waited until my Ohio plates expired, reasoning that since I wasn't going to get a refund on the unused portion of my Ohio plates, buying Oklahoma plates was akin to paying my highway taxes twice. I reasoned my way out of obeying an idiotic rule while he did the right thing and paid up.
