Musings on Rangarajan alias Sujatha....

Dear All

I happened to read a (very short) novel of writer Sujatha today morning.....it is titled "Marina" .....& a typical detective novel where his evergreen characters Ganesh and Vasanth unveils a big lie....

The novel contains all the basic elements of a sujatha novel - the thinking Ganesh, casual Vasanth, a very nice plot & interesting characters like a modern boy around whom the story revolves, his would be, his friends with whom this fellow smokes "bad", his bruding father and mother and more importantly a crime branch inspector.

The boy - who is just 19 years old - while "bad" smoking with his friends at Marina Beach late in the night gets into a needless physical assault with a stranger, assaults him for self defensive. Seeing the stranger fall down with blood rushes to home along with friends....next day paper reporting that a young man is dead in the beach....A crime inspector somehow smells the episode and tries to blackmail his father to take a huge compensation to shut off the story from getting publicised....Ganesh jumps in and saves the father by proving that the crime inspector is playing farce....and no one died at the beach...

This novel is deceptively small....and every inch of the story is in Sujatha's style....infact I got reminded of the face of this mild mannered gentleman's face which is quite popular (who is one of my favourite) as I turned page by page....It is quite long I have read a novel and this one did not leave me from its grip.....

Rangarajan, a simple man with strong moorings to orthodox life style due to his origin at Srirangam weaves quite an interesting drama around the characters which is not HIM or which is definitely not resembling his own life....

In this particular novel, I could sense the sharpness of the words coming out of various characters through the extremely natural dialogues and most importantly, touch of profound philosophy (he mainly touches upon generation gap and the problems that RICH class face in their lives) very gently.....reminding me that I am holding the book of one of the great writer of our times...He is one such author whom I have been revering for more than 2 decades.....(I still cannot forget the first novel that I had read written by him....it was named as "andru un arugil"...revolving around three characters...Pulli, amaru and nila...think it was taken as a movie quite recently.....starring Roja as the main character...OR Nila's actress mother)

Some time back, this writer got into a cotroversy when he made a statement that he does not write in any monthly magazines as he saw some one with whom he travelled in train threw it off after reading the same, matter of factedly....IT naturally provoked many of the seasoned writers and patrons of monthly magazines and I remember one particular gentleman retorted ("perhaps it was Sujatha's story"). I have never heard any thing controversial about this writer except this one...and he always inspires me with his genius on three fields....His expertise on science related things, his deep knowledge in Tamil literature with special reference to Vaishnava culture...and last but not the least, his innocence and ability to portray a flavour of innocence regardless of what the subject he is writing about (ike a lotus flower)

I can only close this mail unable to type any thing more on this writer.... He is quite old now (should be past 70s....). I sincerely pray to Almighty that this Gentleman lives a extremely peaceful life in the rest of the years and feels completely satisfied about himself and quite convinced about the purpose of his life....!! He is not just another human being of this over populated country...

Thank you Sujatha...

suchoo