This shot of an effigy of Ravana is my most viewed photograph, with almost 2500 hits at the time of writing. It got so many hits not because it’s a particularly good photo, but because Yahoo used it on a special page for Diwali Mela last year. They may have chosen it because of the link I included to Nina Paley’s wonderful Battle of Lanka scene: You will not see finer demon vs monkey combat. (This is an early version of the scene)
Nina Paley has now finished the entire Sita Sings The Blues movie and is about to start pressing DVDs. As well as being a great animation (with a marvelous soundtrack by early Jazz star Annette Hanshaw), the production of the movie has highlighted many problems with the current copyright regime, and turned Nina into a leading campaigner for copyright reform.
While I was at the Jain event last week one of the speakers mentioned Rama’s hunting of the deer, as described in the Ramayana. I haven’t read any of the Indian classics yet, but I knew of this legend from watching Nina’s film.
Sita Sings the Blues is Creative Commons licensed, like most of my photos. You can legally download the entire movie in various formats, and a special DVD edition will soon be available. Here’s a low quality version on GoogleVideo:
(That’s all)
