Sujatha

[Pic Courtesy The Hindu]

The world of Tamil blogs has seen a lot about Sujatha a.k.a Rangarajan, the popular Tamil writer, recently. A recent article(reproduced in Tamil here in Desikan's blog) the author wrote in Vikatan on account of his 70th birthday(May 3rd) triggered an emotional response, both online and in other forms of media, from his innumerable fans. In the very introspective article, he talks about memory loss as a sign of his getting ahead in years and looks back on his life so far.

I have never read a complete novel by Sujatha(or any other Tamil author, for that matter). I did start reading some of his stories like Vikram(mainly because I was attracted by the accompanying stills of a dashing Kamalhassan), a Ganesh-Vasanth tale, the science fiction tale with the robot dog (Gino??), etc. that were serialized in Kumudham or Vikatan. But I never lasted more than a few weeks (this is true of all serialized stories I tried to read).

The reason behind this is what I look for when I read rather than the quality of those stories. A book provides instant gratification as long as you are ready to keep turning the pages. If you are impatient to know the fate of a person or the outcome of a situation, you just continue reading until they are revealed. You are guaranteed to know the answers by the time you read the last page(which is why I have read more than half the pages of some books in 1 sitting). Thats what I had grown up on.

But when it came to serialized novels, the 2-3 pages of progress in the story when a new issue came out, just did not provide the kind of gratification I was looking for after a week of waiting. Not finding the answer to what I was looking for in the current issue and realizing that I have to wait a whole week for any hope of getting the answer was enough to frustrate me. There was also the issue of remembering things that happened in the past weeks, which was tough when you read more than 1 novel in the same period that the serialized novel was published. And since there was always a Hardy Boys or Alistair Maclean waiting for me at the lending library, I never had the chance to check out full Tamil novels.

But I firmly believe that its never too late to go back and discover something you missed out on the first time around. All the discussion on Sujatha made me feel like catching up on the author's writing. So over the weekend I picked up Oonjal, one of the author's early works, from the San Jose Public Library. Better late than never...