A unique website on the Mahabharata - Arvind Venkatraman

Tamil Paaramabariyam
(Tamil Heritage)
invites you and your friends to a programme of
Presenting a unique website
on the Mahabharata
hosted by
Jijith Nedumari Ravi
by
Arvind Venkataraman
at 5.30 pm on the 3rd of July, 2010 (Saturday)
at Vinobha Hall, Thakkar Bapa Vidyalaya, T Nagar.

About the presentation
The epic Mahabharata is remarkable. This, along with Ramayana, knits the culture of pan-India. It has stirred imagination of people from all walks of life, from philosophers, artists etc to common folks. We have here an instance how it has kindled the creative urge of 21st century techy. Using the English translation of the encyclopaedic work by Ganguly available on-line, Jijith Nedumari Ravi, an NRI in the US, developed a remarkable site, for Mahabharatha, called Ancientvoice.
A composition of the size of Mahabaratha has numerous characters, places, animals, weapons etc. Ancientvoice offers better search facilities and novel feature of indexing all unique nouns. Thus the analysis thereof becomes interesting.
Jijith, apart from offering the text and the indexing, has gone further in researching the epic to come out with illuminating articles, illustrative maps and paintings. He has also probed the epic scientifically and has come up with various hypotheses. These hypotheses are thought-provoking. Irrespective of the person's subscription to the hypothesis, these would induce the readers to look at the epic from a fresh perspective and often leading the view to examine the epic in a new light. The says:
This website is a wiki site like Wikipedia, but contains much more features than a Wikipedia. It contains within it the whole of Mahabharata wikified containing more than 2000 wiki pages and more than 200,000 hyperlinks. It contains 7500 plus categorized pages dedicated to each noun in Mahabharata. It contains videos, images, digital maps (Epic India), Google maps (Epic India) and animations related to Mahabharata, created by the author. It also contains many articles authored by the author and his research material which was the result of 20 years of research into Mahabharata.

Arvind would introduce the site and highlight the features of the site. He would try to make the programme interactive.
This would be followed by a discussion on what other activities can be taken up on similar lines and what value we could bring.
For your information:
Jijith’s site is www.ancientvoice.wikidot.com
Jijith himself has put on the net an introductory PPT which can be accessed at http://ancientvoice.wikidot.com/local--files/new-visitor-page/Ancient%20Voice.pps
Ganguly’s translation of the Mahabharata may be found in the site www.Sacred-texts.com
 
About the speaker:
Arvind, an IT professional from Chennai, is interested in history, Tamil poetry and art, especially, temple art. He dabbles in photography and shares his photographs in Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.co.in/arvind.venkatraman, which has close to 100 albums covering mostly temples of Tamilnadu. He likes to read both fiction and non-fiction, spends a lot of his time on the internet and has travelled widely, both within India and abroad. He is also an avid follower of classical movies - English, Tamil, Hindi.
He is very keen in embarking on projects documenting various heritage sites in Tamilnadu and making it available on the net for public. He is keen to enlist support on this regard.
He lives in Ekkatuthangal with his wife and his twins - daughter and son. His email ID is arvind.venkatraman@gmail.com.