Whiff of optimism ... S.Ramakrishnan

This post should be in Tamil. But, it is in English for two reasons. One, I can type faster in English. Two, I do not know how many Tamil readers would like to read this post. This post also comes two months late. I met Tamil writer S. Ramakrishnan in February, at the Gateway LitFest. I was asked if I can be present at the festival for the session in which he would be speaking, to be an interpreter. I was in two minds. How can I say no to one of the contemporary writers I have been following since the days of his serials in Vikatan, whose writings I liked? But Sanjay Subrahmanyan was singing at the Chembur Fine Arts that evening, which I was in no mood to miss. I had told the organizers that even if I am not required for the session, I would like to come over to meet S.Ra.

I hunted for ‘Upa Pandavam’ the first book that I had read of S. Ra and it had made a big impact on me. Coming from North Tamil Nadu with a rich tradition of Mahabharata recitals and therukoothu ‘Upa Pandavam’ became a favourite. I couldn’t find it and so finally went with one of his recent and Sahitya Akademi Award winning ‘Sancharam’. I met S. Ra at the Experimental Theatre, and we got into a conversation quickly. He was the same as the S.Ra. I had encountered in his writings. Straightforward, simple, conversational and friendly. One thing that made S. Ra my favourite has been his love for travel and his travelogues. So, I asked him if he continues to travel. He said, “yes do, but I am no more interested in seeing places, I have done all that. Now, I am only interested in people, they interest me. I do travel, because my wife wants to see places, and I am taking her”.

The atmosphere at the Litfest this year was even more pessimistic than the previous editions. The irony of it was they writers were gathered to discuss 2025. I didn’t sense any sense of pessimism from S.Ra. We had a lively chat and he told me what he wanted to say about where Tamil writing stands today and what he perceives 2025 would be. He told me, “I have written this down, I can easily write it in English and read it in the session. But, I don’t want to do it. I saw many here talking only their mother tongues, or Hindi. Not a word of Tamil has been heard since yesterday, shouldn’t the sound of the oldest language be heard in this auditorium or not? That is why I decided I speak in Tamil”. Very passionate, and perfect I thought.

The session where S. Ra was to speak was getting delayed. I was getting impatient. But, I wanted to be calm as I didn’t want to mess up his message by making any mistakes in the translation. Extempore interpretations aren’t easy. You can choke up for want of an appropriate word somewhere in between a perfect flow. But, once the session started, I was fully immersed in it. I waited for S. Ra’s turn. S. Ra was an exception that day. He was the only one who had something tangible to say about his vision for 2025. He indeed expressed his observation about how more and more are reading Tamil from an English script. But, He also observed rightly about how thousands are writing every day, hundreds of poets running Facebook pages, waiting for the “likes”. More and more people are writing, enabled by the digital, internet world. There will be more urban centric writing, castes in cosmopolitan cities will become subjects, villages and caste stories from villages may go down, he said. Another point he made was we will soon have a global writing, with all the Tamil diaspora publishing from across the world. The Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada would be publishing, the Singapore Tamils will be publishing and the new migrants from India in other countries could be publishing, so there would be a global writing in Tamil, he said. I admired his optimism, I admired his courage to be an outlier to predict publishing world in 2025 and be positive about writing. S. Ra is a prolific writer, a publisher, voracious reader. He is someone who knows his villages as well as his city, and he has varied interests, from travel to movies. He also didn’t mince his words when a discussion came up about what another writer said in a previous session came up. I really wish I had written down notes from the session that day so that I can record it in its entirety. With passage of two months, and so much of turmoil with the Covid-19 disruption my mind has gone blank. Nevertheless, I what I carried with me was the message of hope, and the pride that a Tamil author delivered it. You know what was one amazing if I may call it a bit of a digression in the speech – that S. Ra said Tamil authors are the only ones who haven’t had a biography to their credit. May be by 2025 we should take it as a mission to write a biography on all our favourite writes, so that we have at least 25 biographies by then.