Hi Sometime back i found that one of the patrons of PS yahoogroups had mentioned about the comparison between ramayana & mahabharata and Kalki's masterpieces.I am adding my views on that line.I consider both Ramayana and Mahabharatha to be novels ,for the sake of such a comparison. SS can be equated to the Ramayana because the characters are so clear cut.There is no grey area in the characters in ramayana.Rama is the purest of all men on earth,while Ravana the vilest of all.Lakshmana,Bharatha,Sita,Hanuman,Vibheshana all are good and their actions pure and noble.The traitor that Vibheshana was ,is not discussed.Rama's side is all good while Ravana is the damned villian with no equal in hard core villiany.Same could be said of SS.Pulikesi is described to be a moron who has no sense of aesthetics or any artistic sense.The people of Vatapi are described as the pompous rich who pracise no subtlety .The upstarts who have suddenly come upon wealth and let it go to their heads. Kanchi on the other hand is described as a city of proud heritage , no upstart like vatapi rather the highly civilized, cultured city of the south.Kalki uses the verses of Bana( i am not sure of the author) who praised Kanchi sky high and put the city in his all time best list. The king Mahendra Pallava ,arguably the most important character in the novel is a highly resourceful man.A man who is so clever at the art of disguise that he could enter pulikesi's camp under the guise of a spy and fool him . Narasimha though hotheaded is the hero of the story brave ,handsome dignified and straightforward as opposed to Naganandhi who is the master of treachery.The tall thin man who is so crooked that had this novel been written by Wodehouse he would have no doubt added that Naganandhi was so crooked that he would make the "spiral staircase look like the shortest distance between two points" . The characters of the females Sita & Sivakami are very much similar in that both of them want to be rescued from the villian only after their abductors are destroyed decimated and the capitals brought down to earth.Such striking similarity (and many more actually.I shall try to elaborate on that some other time), between the epic of the yore and SS makes me wonder whether KAlKI delibrately choose to model SS on the lines of Ramayana. If SS was the Ramayana ,then PS with all its political intigues can be equated to the one only Mahabhartha But that, in the next mail. So long