Friday, July 31, 2015

Aligning the many ramayanas



There are so many different Ramayanas starting from that of Valmiki – each beautiful in its own way, sometimes an expression of human bias, but more often to find the perfect Bhagvan Ram.  As the master of simplicity, Tulsidas says – Jaaki rahi bhavna jaisi, prabhu murati dekhi tin taisi. Finding the perfection in Ram is to find the perfection in (wo)man.

It will be so wonderful to align all these Ramayanas, that of a Valmiki, a Kamban, a Tulsi, the Adhyatma Ramayana and some 400 more… I would want to be able to read all of these versions simultaneously; to know by a click of the button, what Bhagvan Ram said, when Dasratha/Kaikeyi first asked him to leave for the forest – did he blink an eyelid, and in which version? Or how did Bhagvan Ram explain the killing of Bali from hiding or when did first the incident of Hanumanjee opening his chest to show Sita-Ram appear. I will learn immensely from it and also enjoy – rasika of Ram, not Krishna!



In my mind this can be done by doing good natural language processing on the many Indian languages (one will have to see how to take care of ‘samaas’ and ‘sandhi’ of Sanskrit). Alignment algorithms are a plenty starting with dynamic programming with the more sophisticated ones in bioinformatics. A nice web platform can make it super easy to navigate through these many Ramayanas all aligned to each other.

Pros: Trace the history of Ramayana, Fun machine learning and visualization project
Cons: It is just for fun!
To reflect: Why has it not been done already!

Check out Ramayana for the 4 year old ... need to align this too!

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