Questions arising from Ramayan

Whenever we sit down to analyse a document like Ramayan and compare the folklores and available scientific information, many interesting questions arise. Some questions take us through the chapters that we had forgotten to read in school and college. Some lead us to a realization that till different disciplines of education are not combined we donot get a holistic picture of the subject under investigation.

Some of these important questions that came to my mind as well that of other friends and associates are:

1. Was there are need for a bridge between India and Srilanka, when we have been taught in our Geography classes that many years ago existed a single supercontinent called Pangea?
2. Man came from an ape. Various stages of such development led to the current form of Homo Sapiens. So how was it that a Man was not only interacting with Ape like beings but also collabrating on missions of sensitive nature?
3. How did they ever think of an aeroplane (Pushpak Viman) so many years back? They even had a word for this mechanical device!
4. When script came into existence only a few thousand years ago(5000yrs back approx.) and paper came into being in only 104A.D. would someone seriously be interested in taking up a humongously tedious task of writing down a piece of fiction?
5. Is it really true that most humans in the history or in the pre-historical era acted in a frivolous manner as it is assumed to be in today's time. Hadn't certain faculties of our mind developed enough to do some serious and truthful work? Does an imaginative mind indicate an underdeveloped mental faculty for being intelligent and serious?
6. Is our current understanding of science and history the absolute understanding or have we been experiencing evolution in both even within the last 100 years?
7. Are historians very sure of the story they build up on the basis of archaelogical findings and other sources or do they give us the "most probable" story that can be consistently built from such sources?

There are many more questions but in this blog I will focus on these questions post-by-post. In future I will also try to involve the experts on various systems by bringing in their comments on the inferences we have drawn here. This will help us maintain the reliability and credibility of our new understanding of Ramayan.

I hope the following posts will help us look at Ramayan slightly differently from our traditionally held view.