Narendra Madhuranthakam

Of late the authorities of higher education made it compulsory that all disciplines in the universities should have a separate paper on human values and ethics. It is a good move to humanize all science and engineering students but the irony is that even the disciplines of literatures weren’t exempted from that. That literature itself is nothing but an artistic way of asserting the human values and ethics is the basic     truth to be noticed but the way that it is enforced on the contemporary generation of students of higher education asserts the lacuna of a system which     was in vague hither to. This situation further demands the importance of an assessment of the educational system that emerged after independence. My great grandfather migrated to the far north of erstwhile North Arcot District of British India from the far south of the same district around 1850s on the request of the people of a village there to teach them education. They provided him with a smal...

When I tried to   read his novel in its serialized version in Andhra Jyothi weekly around 1970 and left it unread within   three or four weeks as I couldn’t understand and follow it   I didn’t   foresee that I would have the rare opportunity of getting befriended to him after   two decades. It didn’t happen suddenly or accidentally as it took more than a decade for bringing us together. He is Vaddera Chandidas, a Telugu novelist par excellence. After the publication of Himajwala , his very first novel he became a celebrity instantaneously. Then I was studying in the high school. After one of his trips to Tirupati, my father told me that he met Vaddera Chandidas there in the University quarter which was almost at the feet of the huge Sheshadri hills. In a secluded house like that he, with his odd simplicity, uncanny truthfulness and unassuming frankness, appeared as a person lost in a forest, according to my father.   When I joined the Degree College in...

Calcutta. Kolkata, the new name given to it makes it quite alien to us as we got used to the old name ever since the childhood. The first acquaintance with it was through a children’s book on Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Pillala Tagore” which was published by National Book Trust and translated into Telugu by my father. The imaginary adventures of the boy Tagore, in the old palanquin in their palatial house, Jorasanko Thakur Bari and his grappling with the Bengali prosody quite naturally haunted the budding creative writer for a long time. My acquaintance with Calcutta for the second time was through the works of Sarath. The illustrious Sarath Chandra Chattopadhyay had become the popular household writer Sarath babu to the Telugu people due to the great translator, Bondalapati Sivaramakrishna of the renowned Desi Publications. The indebtedness of the Telugu reading public in general and that of me in particular to that translator par excellence is something beyond the words. When I ...

To call The Mahabharatha a literary text is a heresy and to say that it is a scripture amounts to sectarianism. Then what it is? It is a part of life to us, the people of erstwhile North Arcot district of British India and to the southern parts of Chittoor district and the northern parts of Vellore district of the present times. Every village of this area contains a place called Bharatham Mitta and many of these places have a small temple of Dharmaraja which becomes the hub of the respective village in the months of May and June every year as it would be the setting for the Mahabharatha yagna. It is hot summer when the mercury climbs over 40 degrees, the water level in the wells would get shrunk and the peasants would be waiting for rains. People of this area conduct the Harikathas   of Virataparva whenever there is draught and Nalacharithra when they fall on evil days as they believe that that   would bring    them good luck and happiness . Organizing Mahabhara...

Around 35 years back, may be in 1977 0r 1978, when I was studying B.A in Sri Venkateswara Arts College, Tirupati; I received an invitation from the District Nehru Youth Centre to participate in a Young Writers Workshop which would be conducted in Besant Theosophical College, Madanapalli. Though I was born and brought up in the same Chittoor district I didn’t get an opportunity of spending few days in Madanapalli till then. When I reached BT College on an evening I saw nearly a dozen young writers in between 20 and 30 years, of our district who were put up in a class room. The people whom I still clearly remember among them are: a group of young poets who had already published two volumes of poetry with the name “ Nisi Kavulu ” (Poets of Darkness) who include,    Madan Mohan Reddy, Kasim Yusifi, Mahesh Kumar, KS Ramana and Harish along with another    poet Kaluvagunta Ramamurthy and an elderly    poet, Jettigundla Raghunatha Reddy. The memory of the three da...

My rendezvous with    U. R .Ananthamurthy    began long back, may be three decades back, around 1980, when I    borrowed his novel    Samskara  ( beautifully translated into English from Kannada by A. K . Ramanujan) from our University library and thumbed through a part of it quite casually. The dilemma of an agrahara over the conducting of the funeral rites of a Brahmin, Narayanappa, who led a bohemian life and flouted all the rules of Brahmanism without any exception and the sincere effort of the head of the agrahara, Pranesacharya, to resolve the impasse challenged and fascinated the wits of a young reader but the way that the protagonist stranded in the quest of his self in the second part didn’t enthused the amateur bibliophile. But the fix of Pranesacharya haunted me for a long time and it took many years for me to understand that the very dilemma was a trick employed by the writer to launch his protagonist into a scathing introspection...