The Ramayana follows Rama's exile, Sita's abduction and his return to Ayodhya

the gist

The Ramayana, traditionally attributed to the sage Valmiki, is a Sanskrit epic and one of the two Itihasas of Hinduism, with over 24,000 couplets in seven kandas. It narrates the life of Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu and prince of Ayodhya. Rama is born to King Dasaratha and Queen Kausalya. He wins Sita, daughter of King Janaka, by stringing a great bow that no one else could string, breaking it in the process. On the eve of his crowning, his stepmother Kaikeyi claims two boons and Rama is exiled for fourteen years; he accepts with calm self-control, and Sita and his brother Lakshmana follow him into the forest. Bharata refuses to profit and rules on his brother's behalf. In the forest Ravana, king of Lanka, uses the rakshasa Maricha, disguised as a golden deer, to lure Rama away and carries Sita off. The vulture Jatayu tries to save her. Rama and Lakshmana meet Hanuman, Rama's greatest devotee, win the battle against Ravana, and Rama returns to Ayodhya with Sita to be crowned. The epic survives in northern and southern recensions and many other versions.

so what

The Ramayana strongly influenced later Sanskrit poetry and Hindu life and culture, and its main figures became central to the cultural consciousness of many nations, Hindu and Buddhist. It portrays ideal relationships, the ideal son, brother, husband, wife and king, and its deepest moral influence is the importance of virtue in a person's life and in the guiding ideals of a state.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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