Ramdas Padhye on YouTube

Ramdas Padhye is a well-known puppeteer and ventriloquist in India.

Ramdas Padhye (see previous post) is probably India's best-known puppeteer and ventriloquist. His work is regularly seen on film, television and stage in India and internationally. There's a nice promotional video on YouTube right now about his life and work.

Indian Puppet Videos

A Beautiful Mind is a new puppet podcast from India.

One country who's puppetry North American audiences rarely get exposed to is India so I thought I would post a couple of examples of Indian puppetry that I've been sent recently:

• A traditional Indian puppet performance with marionettes from YouTube. A similar video can be found here featuring a neat trick marionette.
  
  
• A Beautiful Mind is a new podcast by Satyajit Padhye - son of the well-known Indian puppeteer Ramdas Padhye (see previous post) - who plays an illiterate Indian Politician who has a puppet alter ego. I am not sure how well this show translates culturally to a non-Indian audience, but I think it's very interesting because it's one of the first puppet web series I've seen from Asia.
  
  
• A political puppet show from Indian television. The quality of the video is not good, but the show looks very interesting and well done.
  

Thanks to Satyajit and CB for the links!

Using Puppetry To Change The World

Puppetry is used to help fight the AIDS epidemic in India in the short film AIDS: The Deadline.

AIDS: The Deadline is an interesting short film from producer/director Devendra Patil and puppeteer Ramdas Padhye. It was released on World AIDS Day (December 1st) and is intended to raise awareness of AIDS in India, which is a huge problem that desperately needs to be brought under control. The most recent official statistics suggest there are at least five million Indians infected with the disease and many AIDS groups believe the real numbers are much, much higher.

Puppetry is often a great tool for combating and educating people about socially taboo problems like AIDS in developing countries. If you're really passionate about using puppetry to further social goals please consider attending the Puppet Power 2007 conference in Calgary next May. The keynote speaker will be Gary Friedman who will be sharing his experience with using puppetry to fight AIDS and apartheid in South Africa and the conference sounds like it will be a wonderful, inspiring event.

You can also read more about how puppets are used to create social change around the world at UNICEF's excellent Puppets With Purpose web site.