Category: Books

Title of the book “Payanmuraith Thirnaivu NutpangalLiterary criticism: some practical insights,applications. Author: Prof.Antony Cruz,Professor and Head of the Department,Tamil studies,St.Joseph College(autonomous),Trichinapalli,India This is a brief and yet a highly accomplished exercise in literary criticism covering some unsual fields in literature in the Tamil langauge.Just in 150 pages,with 15 chapters,the essays collected here deal with topics…

Shameful Flight,The Last Years of the British Empire in India, by Stanley Wolpert pp 231,OUP, 2006 This book by a serious scholar of India’s modern history,an authoritative writer on Gandhi and Jinnah,has now produced a book that would give us,Indians of the older and younger generations, a new perspective and a thoroughly balanced account of…

  I was always interested in Indian philosophical issues. There is a close affinity between Tamil language and Saiva Siddhanta philosophy. In the year 1966 I was asked to write an article comparing western and Indian philosophy by the editor of this journal Rao Sahib N. Murugesa Mudaliar, a competent writer in both Tamil and…

This is the sketch by a Santiniketan artist who was working with me at the school I founded in my remote village in South India. This is the view of the original tiled roof along with the trees and the backdrop of western ghats. The school started in 1962 soon after I returned from Oxford….

There is no word, God, in Hawkins’s latest book. A Briefer History of Time (2005) is a deceptively simple book of just 162 pages but is a very hard going reading indeed. I grappled with it for sometime and then honestly given up! But one can read it or glance through the pages for the…

My entry into politics started as soon as I came back from England in 1961-62. Fresh from my Oxford Fabian socialist enthusiasm I looked for socialist friends in the Congress party. In 1962 or so, there was a new movement in the party started by Gulzarilal Nanda to promote an ideological shift towards a doctrinaire…

This was my first poetry book in Tamil published in 1959 while I was in England. Like all first poetry books this is a thin volume of few pages got together by a few friends of mine. Besides the fact that the first poem was written while I was barely 15 years old. This piece…

  This was a rare book that brings to light what the outside world does not know about how Rabindranath Tagore’s arts, in particular the famous Santiniketan, style of dancing was evolved. Tagore was infact lucky to have this unknown artist from the deep south of India from Pollachi, Coimbatore District. He studied art at…