Details, Details

Now there's a buffer zone in my Senior Research Project. Today is the 14th of February, my flight leaves the 18th of March, and in between these two dates, I have found myself still crunching for time. That could be considered one heck of a buffer time, but given my project, the more time to prepare, the better. There is *seriously* a lot of work to do before I fly over to Pakistan and collect a whole bunch of stories from people there.

It's a teensy bit stressful, if you really want to know.

So this week, I did some research, to prepare for the inevitable abundance of Pakistani culture I will have to face in the near future.

I researched known folktale stories from different regions of Pakistan and tried to dig deep for each. The sad part is that I only found a handful. The happy part is that each make the area of Pakistan come alive. Somehow, I imagine myself hearing a few of these very same stories, but from different perspectives and different perceptions. I even jotted down a few that mother used to tell me as a child. With all these--what I call "Base Stories"--, in situations where I find myself listening to the same story from somebody in a different region of Pakistan, I can compare the similarities and/or differences.

So I have here three of the few stories that I collected from the World Wide Web (curiosity never killed the cat):

1. The Gifts of Wali Dad
2. Heer Ranjha
3. Dulla Bhatti

Till next week!