rangOli with strings

By the way, I forgot to mention in my text above. These string rangOlis have the quality of handedness. These and their mirror images are quite different in the way in which the up and down movements of strings take place. That means these are chiral. Regards! - mOhana

namastE /\ ranga means stage and in the case of rangOlis, it can be the frontyard or the place of worship or a stage or a manTapa. valli or vallika means creeper. The word rangavalli(ka) literally means a creeper or some such pattern on a stage. The word rangOli is a popular variant of the word rangavalli. To draw the various patterns, the placement of dots is of great help. The dots can be arranged basically in two ways - rectangular grid or an isometric (hexagonal} grid. The first one is what is commonly called straight and the second one is what goes by the name in-between. The dots are like guideposts and help in drawing the patterns. Now are dots really necessary for drawing rangOlis? If people have good geometrical insights, they can draw them without these. One of the artists on this forum has given many examples drawn freehand. For many of those, we can place dots and then they become dotted patterns. There are other works that are mainly artistic without much symmetry like the vinAyaka of another artist that has dots. In this case, we can remove the dots too and the art will not suffer or lose its beauty. I do not agree with the definition or nomenclature of calling artistic works only as rangOlis and the rest as kOlams. Any way in the kannaDa speaking households, those that have dots and those that do not have dots, all are called rangOlis. I am not making it up. Please read the poem I translated and the original also in the poems section where the mention of rangOli and chukke (dots) are mentioned in the same poem. Again people can use terms with which they are comfortable as it is quite easy to understand what they really mean. Regards! - mOhana