Narendra Madhuranthakam

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...

Marriage, family, village, and kingdom- we owe a lot to all these institutions. And all of them disappointed us at times, some times and many times. Thomas Hobbs, in his famous book  Leviathan , observes that man comes into a covenant with the society only to have protection from the stifling forces and never hesitates to disobey it when it ceases to do that. But the irony is that all these institutions which were originated to provide him happiness outgrew in the course of the time and he had lost his say in the molding of his own life as he himself has become an inextricable part of it. Eventually    the society has become a prison for him in which, to quote from W B Yeats’ famous poem  The Second Coming , Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosened upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. But during the...

The first week of every year has been    the time for the yearly cultural fest of Ajo Vibho Kandalam foundation since 1993.I have been attending it since 1996 and in between I might have skipped it     twice or thrice. I met the directors of the foundation for the first time in January 1996 in Thummalapalli Kalakshethram at Vijayawada when the fest was conducted there. The elder person among them was then in his early fifties. Bubbling with enthusiasm and fiery with his firm convictions he was very much like Greek Hero. He is Appajosyula Sathyanarayana, a distinguished professor in the Computer Science Department in Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey U S A .The second and third persons are twins, Vishnubhotla Ramanna and Vishnubhotla Lakshmana who are so identical that it took many years for me to identify them separately. Later I found out that Ramanna is an I T Manager at Alley Bank Rochester Hills Michigan USA and Lakshmanna is a senior En...

To be or not to be was the question I dallied with when I received the invitation from Shinie    Antony, the    co-founder of Bangalore Literary Festival to be a participant of this year’s festival    and the reason was nothing but the literary turmoil going around across the country at present. Many illustrious writers recently retuned their awards given by the Sahithya Akademy in protest of the murders of the writers by the fanatics and the growing intolerance prevailing in the country, some people questioned those writer’s integrity by declaring that intolerance and homicides are not recent up comings as they persisted in the past as well    and the spokesmen of the government raised the slogan, award-vapsee in the lines of ghar-vapsee. Thus the situation was hot and volatile and who knows the literary festival may become a stage for unforeseen controversies. But the desire to feel the pulse of the writers and readers prevailed over my misgivin...

Barampuram, which is also called Berhampur and Brahmapur, is a small town in the state of Odisha . It is around 150kms away from Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha and just 20kms from the border of Andhra Pradesh. As it is on the railway track in between Kolkata and Vizianagaram, it is obvious that the spirit of Renaissance flourished at Kolkata during the 19 th  century reached Vizianagaram through its gateway. Gidugu Ramamurthy Panthulu the champion of Telugu Vyavharihika Basha (colloquial language) and the classmate of Gurajada Apparao, the epoch-maker of Modern Telugu literature, lived there.    Gidugu Sithapati, the son of Gidugu Ramamurthy Panthulu led a movement to join the taluq of Parlakimidi in Andhra Pradesh after the Independence as Telugu is the mother tongue of more than half of its population. V.V.Giri, our former President was also a Telugu man born and brought up in Berhampur. I got an opportunity to visit Berhampur recently when Vijaychandra, a noted poe...

“Those green mountain peaks, having quested for the white cloud which covered the blue sky like a grandeurs veil and then exhausted and caved down into a valley, were like nakedly sleeping lonely maidens. The forest all around was like the undressed hair reflecting tragedy. Like the intertwined tresses the trunks of awkward trees and    broken trunks… the scars on the black stones made of rain water…      the diffused shadows of the clouds between the peaks that remind one of    the illusion of desire that unfurls before the eyes    opened from darkness    … the road that gets disappeared after meandering like the tears that flow between the breasts…and the half    dried rivulet…as if stooping the heads    and looking down at their feet having got abashed of their beauty… down, further down…down and downer… that scene drooping down to the nether world and that experience is the valley of Araku…” Thus begins the s...

He is popularly called C K and his full name is C K Narayana Reddy. Vallampati Venkatasubbaiah, the noted critic of Telugu literature and a friend of my father used to refer to CK and his commitment with Communist ideology frequently. I was only a boy of 5 years when CK was the MLA of the then our constituency, Piler and he settled down in Hyderabad by the time I joined the Junior College and hence I never had the opportunity of meeting him in person. But I have been reading the books he published right from 1973 and learnt many things about him through my friends. I have been eager to learn more about CK as many revered him as our local hero. A recent book published by Hyderabad Book Trust, “Nenu Communisttuni” a biography of CK fulfilled my desire to know more about him to a certain extent. Born in a feudal family of farmers that contained more than 100 acres in a small village near Piler in Chittoor district, CK had his schooling in Tirupati and Madanapalli. He despised discriminati...

I met Chaganti     somayajulu who is popularly known as Chaso thrice. The first time was when Kalipatnam Ramarao, the doyen of Telugu Short Story , took me to Vizianagaram, way back in 1985, to show me the historic town , the citadel     of Telugu culture    which produced many heralds of modern Telugu literature and other fine arts like Gurajada Apparao and Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu . As it was the lunch time Chaso invited us to the lunch and so I joined him as Ramarao used to take meal only twice in the day and always skipped the lunch. It was a typical middle class Brahmin lunch, rice, Gongura, dhal, ghee, vegetables and curd. While we were eating Chaso was enquiring many things, not about literature, casually. After the lunch he enjoyed a cheroot and before he set out for a siesta, we took leave of him. I met Chaso in Visalandhra Book Shop in the main bazaar road of Tirupati on an evening around 7 P. M. after a few years. By then Chaganti Sankar, Chaso’...

“I have been a regular reader to Andhra Pathrika since 1947. Then I learnt about Bharathi monthly and I began to study its back numbers also. Now I imagine that the reader in me might have transformed into a writer in the due course very much like the old patient getting metamorphosed into a doctor. We have a proverb in Telugu that the story goes to Kanchi and then we return to our house. But by the time I began writing stories most of the stories which were written at that time were reaching 17, Thambuchetty Street, Madras. Thus I deem it a privilege to be a product of the experiment of creating and molding a writer  conducted by the Journalistic family of Andhra Pathrika by illustrating what a good story is through the publication of good stories, rejecting some to reflect how should not be one is, requesting the writer to send his contribution soon as the readers are imploring for, selecting the story which was sent to the weekly for the monthly, soliciting the stories for ...