Ramleela.
The website for Railway Ramleela in Alambagh, Lucknow. The festival turns 76 this year, and my father is one of the people who run it.
- Type
- Website
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Design · Build
- Built with
- React, Vite, GSAP, Lenis, ffmpeg
- Link
- railway-ramleela.vercel.app
Who it's for
Nobody finds this site on Google. Someone from the committee drops the link in a WhatsApp group and it travels from there, mostly to people over 40, on their phones. They want to know one thing: which leela is tonight, and what time. So that's the first thing you see. There's a "today's leela" bar at the top, a button that makes all the text bigger, and every line is in both Hindi and English.
Keeping it respectful
Before I started, my father told me: Lord Ram is God, keep this in mind. That one line decided a lot. Nothing on the site plays around with the images. Every animation had to answer one question: does this feel respectful, or does it look like I'm showing off? Quite a few ideas didn't make it.
The film at the top
The opening is a short film that moves as you scroll. Your thumb pulls it forward until it rests on the Ram Darbar, right as the dates come in. Phones get their own version: the middle of the shot, with Lakshman, Ram and Sita, sits over a blurred copy of the same frame, so nothing gets awkwardly cropped. Only a small part loads before the page opens and the rest comes in while you scroll, which matters a lot on mobile data.
What I took out
I built a month calendar for the schedule, looked at it, and removed it. A simple list of the eleven nights answered the question better. Same with some decorative dividers that looked fussy. Deleting things I'd already made was a big part of this project.