Category: Literature

Which Indian language will have the distinction? Kannada or Bengali, Malayalam? Tamil has no chance! So too Hindi & others! As I finished writing on Tagore and Yeats my thoughts turned to contemporary Indian literature. The Indian language literature. One of my recent preoccupations has been to promote Tamil, my mother tongue, its current literature…

Much of the modern Tamil poetry is written by middle class professions, mostly Tamil pundits or other lowly job holders. You don’t have a Tagore today. Or there are poets as revolutionaries either!  It is a laid-back, confused society! Our revolution talk seems to be mere bravado!  Either out of inferiority complex, or mere helplessness!…

Tamil writers and scholars would be driven to silence if you ask them why no major literary prizes are coming to their literature!  I have been asking these questions lately in many forums.  I am surprised such thoughts haven’t come to the Tamil minds.  They are all so self-absorbed, operating in many narrow factions and…

We live in a world where English had become a much powerful force and in the globalised world, translations of our literature into English assume critical importance.  How to expose the modern Tamil literature and poetry in particular to the international audience. We have to promote translation projects, run translation courses in our language departments,…

Today, there are many complex issues that impact on modern man Prof.Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winner for economics, a friend from my Santiniketan days had explored the theme of human freedom in many of his books.  Sen, in my opinion, had taken our knowledge of human freedoms to new heights.  There are also the…

I often ask friends and scholars: what chance we have to make this century an opportunity for Tamil Nadu?  Tamil literature? Answers vary.   The genuine Dravidian culture and civilization can be promoted to world level only by transforming the Tamil society into a vibrant enlightened society.  I feel there is no other way except to…

Somehow, I feel the Tamil intellectuals; I mean the Tamil scholars, had never studied the intellectual growth of Tamil society in the past 300 years.   In the way I see it. Why three hundred years?  I take this period roughly correspond with the rise of European Enlightenment, starting with the Newtonian revolution in physical sciences…

What I have collected in the volume here as my latest offering is to give shape to my thoughts as experienced over a long period of living my life against so many odds. After I finished writing my autobiography I imagined I had expressed all my thoughts or nuances of my feelings in Tamil prose. …