This week I read the short story entitled Discipline by Geeta Tewari which is a story that details an Indian American girl’s struggle between her and her family’s valuation of keeping an Indian girls’ virginity. In the story, we the difference of sexuality in both the Indian and American culture and we how that blends and becomes a single thought process for Aarti, the protagonist of the story. Aarti’s Indian parents strictly value a girl keeping her virginity until being married with an Indian man. This is instilled in Aarti and she values this to be true, even though she understand the American values of sex and virginity and desires sex outside of marriage. We see her Aarti’s Indian girlfriends also value this and form a club to uphold these standards if virginity. However, when Aarti moves out for college and meets her American roommate, Courtney, who embodies American ideas of virginity, Aarti understands how her life can be if she did not uphold her virginity pact. With this and the temptation of boys Aarti breaks her promise to remain a virgin. Afterwards, she is ashamed with herself and hides her sexual history from both herself and the rest of the world.
With the Google fusions network graph we are able to see the connections that the characters have. Aarti is at the middle, she is the single cohesive node that acts as the center of the entire network. In this we can see where the different groups of characters form different groups for Aarti to come into. One being her family, an another is the group of girls that made the virginity pact with her, and the last being the people that have influenced her college and sexual experience including both Courtney and S, the boy she has sex with. In the network graph we can which way the relationships move. The graph shows that many of the relationships are moving outward indicating these are direct connections of the people that Aarti has become familiar with. In addition, the lines that are not highlighted indicated that these are relationships that Aarti si not apart of or that Aarti has no real significant relationship with this character. That is the case for Aarti and Jyoti’s Boyfriend who is not a physical character in the story. The limitations of this method is that there does not seem to be a way to indicate the severity of a relationship, such as that Aarti and Courtney have a stronger relationship that Aarti has with Jake. Also, there is no way to show the amount of interactions that characters have with one another without reading the labels associated with each tie.