why nice girls pick losers

Puppet making workshop tomorrow.

the kids are going to make rod puppets like the highly stylized wayang kulit puppets and will use them to stage a shadow puppetry show on stories from the ramayana or the mahabharata.

the scripts are in - one around sita's swayamvar and the other one on her abduction. we have such a fine sense for melodrama. even kids could unerringly go right to some of the most dramatic episodes from the great epic.

bits from the script for the play on Sita's Swayamvar;

narrator: janaka called all the princes to his court and declared a competition.

janaka: today i declare that who will lift the SHIVADHANUSH and string it will be declared the husband of my beautiful daughter.

narrator: many princes, demons, rakshasas tried to string it. but everyone failed. few were not even able to lift it. it was like nobody could lift or string it.

narrator: king janaka went to vishwamitra and told him something.

janaka: vishawamitra, would brave rama like to string the bow?

narrator: rama went to string the bow. he successfully stringed the bow. but soon the bow broke.

janaka: i announce rama my lovely daughter's husband. i am a happy man now.

soon rama and sita are married.

the end.

the end indeed, in more ways than one. poor girl.

:::

the entire idea of her swayamvar is so depressing - lovely princess, beloved daughter, all dewy eyed and innocent, the kohl in her eyes almost melting with the wait for the prince, landing the biggest chauvinist in the assembly. what would sita's fate have been, if she had but chosen a more ordinary man than the purushottam? definitely not the deified symbol of indian womanhood, but all the same, she could have been perfectly happy being wife and mother to an ordinary man and his ordinary kids.

following his shadow through dense woods and dusty roads, soft feet worn out on thorns and pebbles, sheltered complexion seared in noonday suns, rough cottons for the silks, flowers for the jewels...to what end? doubt and renunciation? to become the touchstone for a man's pride?

what waste.

i cant help being torn between sympathy and contempt for her.

i'd have taken ravan any day - good king, interesting parentage, skilled musician, good brother, brave warrior. plus, he must have really, really fancied her. helen of troy was more practical in these matters.

how stupid to have waited for him who led her through hardship and came for her not out of love, but out of a misplaced sense of bravado and affronted pride.