ABOUT ME
Welcome to this website where I write about the topics that have always interested me even from an early age. This interest in what would now be classified as "humanities" would have remained a very private one or confined to personal conversations if not for the growth of modern social media. Social media too was a motivation for putting down thoughts into paper. ​
Writing this "About Me" made me reflect about the topics that have interested me through the passage of time. My school going age reading were books by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Bronte Sisters, John Bunyan (Pilgrims Progress) and numerous other long forgotten ones. Also unforgettable was 'Lorna Doone', a tale that kindled all sorts of boyish romantic fantasies. What all these books had in common was that they were shortened (abridged) versions of classic English historical novels. These books once belonged to adults who had shoved them into dusty old cupboards and forgotten about them, people who now seemed completely disconnected from any interest in literature.
In an otherwise ordinary boyhood marked by social anxiety, timidity and a tendency to be a loner, one particular moment has always stayed with me. When I was in primary school (First batch of C.S.I Matriculation School, Nagercoil) there was an exhibition of Soviet literature. One of the books on display was an attractive, glossy, hard bound book called "This is my native land". I was so fascinated by the book that I walked to my grandparents house during lunch break and demanded that they lend me twenty rupees for buying this book. My totally bewildered grand parents faced with an insistently demanding grandson had to scrummage through their "money jar" for a fresh 20 rupee note. I would think of this as one of the few times in my life when desire overcame my timidity.
If my childhood reading was reading anything that I could get my hands upon, the books I read during my college days and throughout my twenties seem to have one thing in common: they all grappled with questions about the meaning of life. I remember reading works like Albert Camus's The Plague and The Rebel, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. An example of how a book can profoundly alter a person's ideology is my own experience reading W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. I identified so deeply with the main character, Philip Carey, that when he finally breaks free and declares, "After all, it's not my fault. I can't force myself to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don't believe in Him, I can't help it.". I felt exactly the same way. In that moment, literal Biblical reading lost its hold over me.
I'm in my early 50's now and this is the era of Amazon and Kindle, where book buying and reading have been utterly transformed, and my own interests have shifted dramatically as well. In the past decade I have been deeply drawn to South Indian history, the Social history of South Indian societies, Christian mission history, Novels exploring cultural and social themes, Books that deal with social and cultural shifts and as such. To just give an example, a book that I read recently was "The Saint in the Banyan Tree" by David Mosse. This book deals with the impact of Jesuit Catholicism for over 400 years on an already existent religious political system in an area of Tamilnadu called Ramnad.