A Winter in India

Wouldn’t the sales ladies on the first floor of Macy’s love to have the sales commissions for these actors!! Kathakali is a four hundred year old tradition to act out and teach the moral lessons from the Indian Hindu classic literature. We watched part of the one hour cosmetics application. The guy with the big white wing under his chin had a buddy do the hard part. He then added the rest, as did, the other actor entirely. A true performance in a village starts around 10 PM and ends around dawn. For us tourists they do a nightly 1.5 hour show at the cultural center with a narration to orient us. These Kathakali actors use a very stylized symbolic set of hand and arm gestures, facial muscle movements and body movements. Each emotion and action has its own pantomime so the audience can learn the lesson precisely, a Sign Language for Hindu mythology.
Last night’s lesson involved a prince and a demon, disguised as a lady. The demon wants the hunk prince real bad, and gets a little too frisky and the prince cuts off her breasts, nose and ears. The moral is that evil always loses!!!