Sajay, a Mysore IT professional with passion for animation has come up with an item that should interest Jains and other Bahubali devotees. He calls it ‘Virtual Abhisheka’. Sanjay’s creation enables surfers to ‘perform’, at the click of a PC mouse, an ‘abhisheka’ to the image of Bhagavan Gomateshwara Bahubali. The animation piece can play out animated visuals covering various items of ‘abhisheka’ - milk, kum-kum, tumeric, sandal paste etc. – down to ‘mangalarthi’. To give the computer-generated ritual a contemporary touch, there is a clickable helicopter, standing by to shower flowers on Bhagavan’s image.

It took Sanjay six weeks to create this animation. “I am still working on some finishing touches,” he says. The item involved putting together some 400 still images on a flash file and then writing a programme for its animation. You can access the animation at www.mysoretourism.org.