© Designldg In the morning I was leaving the house of Romit in Allahabad and I saw this lady reading the Ramayana. You can see the yellow fabric protecting the holy book in her hands. It is not rare to see elder people reading that kind of things in India, this lady was so deeply into her thoughs that she didn't notice me at all. The Rāmāyaṇa (Devanāgarī: रामायण) is an ancient Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki and is an important part of the Hindu canon (smṛti). The name Rāmāyaṇa is a tatpurusa compound of Rāma and ayana "going, advancing", translating to "the travels of Rāma". The Rāmāyaṇa consists of 24,000 verses in seven cantos (kāṇḍas) and tells the story of a prince, Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon (Rākshasa) king of Lanka, Rāvana. In its current form, the Valmiki Ramayana is dated variously from 500 BCE to 100 BCE, or about co-eval to early versions of the Mahābhārata. As with most traditional epics, since it has gone through a long process of interpolations and redactions, it is impossible to date it accurately. Indian tradition regards the Ramayana as part of Ithihasa, or history, with Valmiki's version as the oldest written form and the most authentic. The Rāmāyana had an important influence on later Sanskrit poetry, primarily through its establishment of the Sloka meter. But, like its epic cousin Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana is not just an ordinary story. It contains the teachings of ancient Hindu sages and presents them through allegory in narrative and the interspersion of the philosophical and the devotional. The characters of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Bharata, Hanumān and Rāvana (the villain of the piece) are all fundamental to the cultural consciousness of India.