Is there a reason you chose to get a tiger tattoo?
I just really liked the look of it, honestly.
Punyakoti
3.
Pragnya Jain, 22
From Karnataka
Recited The story in their mothertongue, Kannada
"This is a story about a herd of cows who go to the forest to graze, where a tiger comes to eat them. All the cows run away, but there’s one cow that gets stuck. This cow is named Punyakoti. The tiger tells her he is going to eat her, and she pleads to him to let her go telling him she has a calf at home she needs to take care of. The tiger replies saying he’s very hungry and can’t let her go. She tells him she will come back; she just wants to let her calf know that she will not be there anymore, swearing that she always speaks the truth. The tiger decides that the cow’s face looks like that of someone who speaks the truth and lets her go. Punyakoti goes home and tells her calf she will not be coming back, and that the herd is their family, his aunts and sisters will feed him and take care of him.
She bids her farewells and goes back to the forest to meet her death. When the tiger sees punyakoti return, he is extremely shocked. He is unable to understand how someone can be so truthful. He tells Punyakoti that he cannot kill a soul that is so truthful and lets her go."
“I actually have a distinct memory from kindergarten, they’d given us finger puppets and I got cows, I don’t know if I learnt this story with those puppets or was just reciting it, but I remember going around reciting the story with those puppets on my fingers.”
I mentioned to Pragnya how I had gotten a massive influx of this same story in the submissions for this project, to which they told me that this story is a very popular song here in Karnataka and played a bit of it for me, which I recorded
