Originally posted by samana17
To say the truth, Indra seems to be under bad light throughout the mythos. Isn't he the god who makes rain?
We have indrajatra every year celebrated by the newari society.
Though it was unfair for the asurs in the case of samundra manthan. But god knows what the asurs could hav done if the amrit had been given to them. Lol.
If Vishnu had issues w/ the asuras having amrit, fine, but then, it was unethical of him to get the devas to invite the asuras to help them do the manthan simply b'cos they were incapable of doing it on their own. It would be like me inviting various groups of friends - personal friends, colleagues, relatives, old schoolmates, et al to a party, have them all help set it up, and then decide that one group of them doesn't deserve to have the cake. If I think that, then the right thing to do is not invite that particular group in the first place.
On a different note, thinking about it some, I just don't think the Bali of Kurma avatar is the same as Bali of Vamana avatar, as mentioned in the SB narrative. For one thing, I go by the Dashavatar theory and that too chronologically - M, K, V, N, V, P,... and not by SB's 22 avatar theory, where Vyasa rather narcissistically makes himself one of the avatars. Also, it defies logic and makes Vishnu schizophrenic to suggest that he had issue w/ Bali getting the amrit in the samudra manthan episode, but no issue making Bali immortal after the Vamana episode. I therefore can only conclude that Bali being a common enough name at the time, the 2 Balis were different, and that Vishnu had issues w/ one of them, but not the other.
On the issue of Indra, as we've discussed in the past, the Vedic Indra did not have any of the negative attributes that the Puranic Indra had. However, since all these stories about Narayan or Mahadev are taken from various Puranas, it's somewhat difficult, if not impossible, to show stories about them, and juxtapose them w/ the Vedic, as opposed to the Puranic Indra.
However, in this serial, they are not being true to even Puranic accounts, let alone Vedic, so that's neither here nor there.