Sita Sings the Blues

After watching this movie in class, I felt a greater appreciation for the last topic we covered. While the story of Rama, Ramayana, is typically explained from the point of view of Rama, it was refreshing and extremely interesting to see Sita's point of view. Where I expected to see Rama heroically sacrificing his love of Sita for his people, I instead saw a pregnant woman, who had done nothing wrong by anyone's standards except get kidnapped, exiled to a far away place by the very man she had been willing to leave her entire life behind for. 

The idea of varying perspectives could be interesting to explore, especially in terms of what Ravana was thinking when kidnapping Sita. According to the narrators of the movie, by all other standards, Ravana was a good man. So what was his reasoning? Was there some deeper motive that we're missing?

The connections the movie made to a modern perspective of the story, in which a woman is left by the man she loves, really helped me to connect the major themes of the story. Although it was slightly awkward to see a major part of the Hindu tradition trivialized in the movie, I think overall it helped people get a better understanding than they would have gotten simply by reading excerpts.