Sita Haran

This is an interesting painting capturing the most dramatic moment in Ramayana. Ravan(Raa-van, rhymes with gun) schemes to abduct seeta and sends his uncle Maarich in the guise of a golden deer as a distraction. Sita sees the golden deer and asks Ram to get it for her. The deer lures Ram away from Sita. The deer also cries out loud mimicking Ram. Sita gets worried and sends Lakshman to check out things. Laxman thinks something is fishy but has to go after some nagging from Sita. As a precaution, he draws a line - Lakshman Rekha (literally, Lakshman's line) - as a protective measure. Only Sita could cross this line and no one could enter inside.

As soon as Sita is alone, Ravan comes in the guise of a hermit asking for alms and Sita crosses the Lakshman Rekha and gets abducted. In the right-side is a bird - Jataayu- who is a witness to the abduction and later gets killed by Ravan when it tries to intercept him. The dying Jataayu provides the first clue to Ram on his search for Sita.

I think the interesting part in the whole episode is the conduct of poor Sita. At each stage its her decision which takes her closer to her own abduction. It is as if she is plotting it herself. She is kind of portrayed as a vain, shallow thinking lady in this whole affair, making us pity her less as a victim than we ought too. Is it because Ramayan was written for a male dominated society by another male that Sita is protrayed in this light. Would a more balanced view have spread across the responsibilty more collectively?

Random Photos: Making of a Rangoli

We made a rangoli on diwali and I put up a series of photographs up in my blog. Its not straightforward to make one blog entry with multiple photos, so each photo is one blog. Hence better to just visit here to see the series.

Sugendha used suji to make the rangoli and colored it with organice colors. I think rangoli is mainly a south indian tradition. Bengali's have a tradition of alpana (it is primarily white) but punjab etc doesn't seem to have any such tradition. And it has a strange association with diwali because they don't celebrate diwali in the south!

Atleast in karnataka they celebrate naraka chaturdashi a day before diwali - thats the day krishna killed the demon narakasur, then they celebrate balipadyam the day after diwali - that's the day Bali was stepped on by Vaman and sent to Patal. What is stranger to me is that supposedly Ram spent a lot of time in south india and rameshwaram is the southernmost part of india but diwali and worship of ram seems missing here. Vishnu is worshipped but in other forms. There seems to be some major differences in the mythology of north and south too but I think I need to do some more research on this.