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,…
Amartya Sen and the New Millennium freedoms
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…
Can we make this a Tamil century?
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…
300 years of the history of Tamil society
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…
My current poems
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. …
Indian poetry writing in English
I was reading off and on a number of Indian poets writing in English and a few of them had become my close friends over the years. Besides Dom Moraes, I got to know rather well Kamala Das, the poetess who writes poetry in English and stories in Malayalam and R.Parthasarathy during his stint with…
Betjeman’s Oxford brings alive my days too!
Just now I was reading through the A Verse Autobiography, by John Betjeman “Summoned by Bells”, published when I was in Oxford in 1960. At that time I didn’t notice it though there was much debate about its literary quality. Now in a new edition and reissued now and available in India, this verse autobiography…
World poetry scene
Back in India, I chose for what seemed heroic and thus tried my hand in several projects, some landed me in trouble and drove me into obscurity, some, daring and untried also lifted me above the ordinary and mundane and had given me the “spirits of the air”, to quote Shelley. If I can quote…