Ponniyin Celvan

Over 14 months ! I have finally completed Kalki's magnum opus Ponniyin Celvan, a five part novel in Tamil. Its amazing how I have been so ignorant about the rich literature of Kalki Krishnamurthy for large parts of my life.
I can immediately conjure up a few reasons,
I went to an English medium school and did not even formally learn Tamil for more than 3 years of my entire schooling!
Literature has little or no place in popular Tamil culture which has come to be defined and dominated by cinema and stupid politics.
Its been a while since Kalki wrote his books?
Kalki was a Brahmin and a forward thinking one at that! He was exactly the kind of Brahmin Karunanidhi and other dravidian ideologues refused to acknowledge the existence of! (As an aside I have to describe this scene in the movie Periyar, when Gandhi asks EVR whether there are no good people amongst Brahmins at all and cites Gokhale as an example! To this EVR in his characteristic wit and sharpness retorts, " If a Mahatma like you can see only one good brahmin , how can normal people like us see any good in them", I doubt if Periyar ever gave a thought about Kalki)

All said and done I am extremely satisfied that I have finally managed to read a full length novel and a classic at that. I have now become fairly familiar with the Kalki genre of Literature having read a couple of his shorter novels and non-fiction writing. Most notable among these is the book called "Sangita Vizhakkal". This work talks about how Carnatic Musicians in TN started accepting Tamil sahityams and giving them equal importance in comparison to other compositions predominantly in Telugu or Sanskrit! Here Kalki's love for Tamil shines through but he also shows how love for one language need not mean hating other languages( the message for linguistic fundamentalists!) I think it is now time for me to look beyond Kalki and read more modern writers like Jayakanthan. This marks the end for a conscious choice that I made two years ago. I promised to myself that I will read more Tamil literature than English for a couple of years. I have done that and from now on I hope to balance my time between English and Tamil. I got to know about sensible science fiction from Dr.Sitabhra Sinha's(IMSc) webpage and would like to try that genre since I seem to have done very little SF genre after Michael Crichton in high school!