First off I must state that I absolutely loved this movie. This type of movie was probably the highlights of my days when I was a child and I do own this movie, but it is back home in Houston. I am kind of sad that I do not have it hear with me to teach me the lessons of how we should treat each other even when we are not the same. I have not read the book before, but I very much do like the read and how the story has been playing out.
Reading the chapter, How Fear Came, made me just have a range of emotions and thought process as I read the chapter. The process of how things had come to be was a very interesting concept and the way it was applied to a now sense. Like how the tiger got its stripes because he had killed a buck and now had to pay for his sins and was marked we stripes so that everyone would know what he did wrong and what had happened. As I read on, I couldn't help to start thinking about how law became unto man and how things were brought to us in a very similar way that they were brought out unto the jungle. "The first of your masters has brought Death into the Jungle, and the second Shame. Now it is time there was a Law, and a Law that ye must not break. Now ye shall know Fear, and when ye have found him ye shall know that he is your master, and the rest shall follow" (Kipling, 9)1. While reading this I started to think about Moses coming down from the path and telling his people of the Law that God has written and that they shall obey these laws or else suffer the rath of the omnificent. I got this strong presence from this quote that you could tell that this is how everything started to be in the Jungle and its the same way for how man was. I think Kipling used these parallels in hopes that readers would be able to see what he wants them to see. He wants them to have a feeling for the animals and wants them to know that of "the laws" of man. We have the written rules that are pushed onto us by congress and the government but there are also the unwritten codes that people share between themselves and I think Kipling wants us to acknowledge both types.
Now man has been brought into the picture and it is said that he now only knows how to kill because one of their own has been killed. Man has been taught that they too can kill and for that matter will kill for the sake of the one that was killed. The tiger is banished and man goes after him because he has wronged man. Man wants revenge. So in some sense the tiger not only taught the man how to kill, but also revenege. "The Law of the Jungle forbids beast to eat Man...The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white man on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers" (Kipling, 8)2 . This is completely true. When man feels threatened and is endangered they go in every way possible to take out whatever is attacking and hurting them to make sure that they are supreme being. Man will destroy everything and not have a care what has been destroyed. Mowgli, though raised by wolves, is ended up disgraced upon because he even looks like man. He is not considered one of them because he is the of the same caliber even though he could do anything that they could do. It's interesting the way we discriminate against others just for looking different when they have probably been raised in the exact same setting that you had been raised in.
1. Kipling, Rudyard. "How Fear Came." The Second Jungle Book. 1985. Accessed 16
April 2009.
2. Kipling, Rudyard. "Mowgli's Brothers." The Jungle Book. 1985. Accessed 16
April 2009.
