City Tour

That craft was very big. But we couldn’t call it a ship. A big craft built for the pleasures of its passengers. In the upper deck amongst comfortably standing, sitting, basking in the sun,lazily swimming in a moon-shaped pool people was Aathma waiting for Nithya.

Not really paying any attention to the book in his hand… he kept glancing at pretty Nithya who was visible every now and then. We couldn’t tell that the craft was going very fast.

Powered by a nuclear power plant in its belly it kept floating on an air cushion.

For Aathma this trip was an important event in his life… In eleven minutes the craft will reach Chennai.

Chennai!

His ancestral place! His great-great-great grandfather’s… family had a house here! And where was it? Triplicane... In Theradi street… Near the temple… the computer told him...

A young man stood in front of him and smiled. He had a small label that said, “guide.”
“Is everything fine?” he enquired.

Aathma shook his head.

“Your wife seems to like this trip a lot!” He said glancing at Nithya dive like an arrow into the pool. “Aathma! Join me” Nithya yelled.

Aathma shook his head.

A gentle breeze ruffled Aathma’s clothes. A sense of joy welled up in him…

“When will we reach Chennai?”

“In thirteen minutes!”

Aathma looked into the distance. The ocean was lazing in an orange hue. The smell of ozone caught Aathma nose. The loudspeaker sparked to life

“Attention... Dear Passengers! Attention! This is the Captain speaking. A warm welcome to all you passengers who have come to see Chennai on this luxury craft.

This is your craft. There is nothing that is not available on board. This craft is a marvel of modern science. Right now we are cruising at five hundred miles an hour. This craft can go on the ocean, go underwater and even hover on land!

If you need an introduction to Chennai since you are here to visit the many places of Chennai, please use the headphones nearest you. Thank you!”

Aathma had finished reading everything about Chennai. Still he felt pangs of anticipation every time he heard Chennai name mentioned. He put on the headphones. He heard a sweet persuasive voice along with some music playing in the background.

Although Chennai or Madras, which was a very important city in South India, existed much before, its formal history began in the year 1639, on the 23rd of August, when Tharmala Aiyappa Nayagan gave permission to Francis Day to build the St. George Fort…

“Day arrived in 1640 in the month of February with twenty five European sepoys and Nagapattan, a Indian expert on explosives. The outer walls of the St George fort were completed in 1640 on the 23rd of April...”

Nithya toweled herself, sat next to Aathma and pressed her ears on his headphones.

“Madras Pattinam was its old name” We do not know the exact origins of this name.
It could have been derived from Matha Raju, who was a king during that time...
Or from a sea-faring tribe called Marakkal rayars, it could have been called Marakkal Rayar before it finally became Madras Pattinam...

Nithya poked Aathma. He lowered his headphones.

“How many times will you keep listening to the history of Chennai? I am bored”

“This is our town Nithya! “We will be going to our home!”

“What will you see in your ancestral home?” “Will there be something stuck on the wall to say that Aathma will be born 350 years from now?”

“It is going to be difficult to even find the house first” “And who knows in what shape it will be”

Most of the homes seem to be in good shape... Hey the guide was enquiring about you...”

“Yeah. He kept looking at me...”

“How do you know that?”

“Every direction I looked he seemed to be there...”

“Cover your chest. You might catch a cold”

“I am hungry”

Why don’t you go down and eat something. I will come after hearing this out.
Be back in five minutes though... We will be reaching Chennai.”

Aathma put his headphones on again.

“While digging the foundation for Mylapore’s Lazarus Church they came upon Manuel Mathras tombstone. Mathra’s family was quite a wealthy family. So it is possible to think it could have come from Mathra’s name.

Mathraza is a Persian word to mean a school or college. There could been an old

Mohammedan school there. So the name could have come from there too...

Anyway the name Chennai stuck.

One by one the passengers were making their way to the upper deck. We are approaching Chennai! Aathma’s heart was pounding! He felt he was approaching his mother...

How far he has come on this journey... He had a holiday on Astro 7. Nithya had a holiday. They caught a shuttle from there to the space station. They didn’t get a reservation and had to wait on the floating station for two days before they got one,
And caught the planetary ship to earth and another trip on earth... a week of stay in hotels, strange journeys, strange rooms, strange faces…

“Why are you so adamant to make this trip? We are wasting our holidays here! We could

have gone to so many new places! They say Helios, the new colony, is like heaven!
You and your Chennai! Be miserable with your history!

“If you didn’t like it, you could have made a trip on your own Nithya!”

“Yeah. I unknowingly made a mistake. Earth is so boring!”

The moment he had heard the news about the discovery Chennai in Astro 7 he was beside himself. He saved money his holidays… and reached here.

“You have seen Chennai. Haven’t you?”

“Once a day… That’s my job!”

“You know all the places don’t you?”

He laughed. “High court, Santhome, Anna Salai, Valluvar Kottam, Kapalesvarar Temple, Kandaswamy temple, fort… What do you want?”

“Do you know Triplicane?”

“Parthasarathy temple is there” Join the third queue.

There on Therady Street is a house…
House?” he looked surprised.

“Why?”

Before he could answer there heard a siren.

”Pay attention. Pay attention” Please stand clear of the upper portions of the craft. The craft is covering itself.

All the people in the upper deck stood in the center. They heard the hum of the engines and a semi-circular plastic wall started to enclose the craft. Suddenly they were engulfed in silence and anticipation.

“Please pay attention. The craft is going to descend into the ocean. We are going to reach Chennai in three minutes… Towards the end of the twenty first century the sea submerged Chennai. With the help of modern science, all the old buildings have been scrubbed, made clean and restored. They are waiting for you! Your craft will submerge and go on the streets of Chennai. There you will hear descriptions of the streets. We will reach St George in two minutes…”

The craft began to submerge.

The craft started to roll in its silvery wake. It was really quiet.

Nagar Valam (1976), Sci-Fi of Sujatha was in limelight during the Tsunami attack. In Jan 2005, an English translation of the story appeared in Sunday issue of The Indian Express. 

The same is reproduced here. Ranga Rengarajan(Sujatha’s son) has done the translation.

--Courtesy Sujatha Desikan

தொடர்புடைய பதிவு:
நகர்வலம் -சுஜாதா

Why He Mattered... Baradwaj Rangan

The unfortunate demise of the Tamil writer Sujatha — from the news-channel eulogies, though, you’d think the man was merely a screenwriter, giving shape to the visions of Shankar and Mani Ratnam — has occasioned a steady outpouring of how-I-learnt-to-read-Tamil-with-his-books memories, and while I know from experience that that’s true, I feel no one has zeroed in on why this is so. 

After all, there were so many other Tamil writers — the great modernist god that was the early Vairamuthu, say — who were Sujatha’s contemporaries and who were certainly no slouches when it came to a certain felicity of expression that could make any rank newbie fall in rapturous love with the language. But I think what made Sujatha stand apart and speak to so many of us who grew up in the seventies and the eighties was that his writings were instantly appealing to a generation that could understand Tamil and speak Tamil and read Tamil and perhaps even write Tamil — but thought in English.

I’m not just talking about the sci-fi setting of En Iniya Iyandhira and its robo-dog named after the Roman goddess Juno — all far, far removed from the sociopolitical and moralistic scenarios that constituted a lot of the writing in the local magazines of the time — but Sujatha’s Western sensibilities would peek through even his pieces on ancient religious texts.

By “Western” sensibilities, I mean that he could demystify the most arcane of abstractions with the lightest of touches and with the gentlest sense of humour. In other words, he would take his subject seriously without taking himself seriously — and that was refreshing to a generation whose defining characteristic was (a borderline don’t-care-ish) casualness. As an aside, maybe that’s why Mani Ratnam felt the time was ripe for his kind of cinema — because he had in front of him a young audience that wasn’t especially “Indian” when it came to, say, respecting authority figures.
    

அக்னி புத்திரன் என்கிற இந்திய ராக்கெட் எதிரிகளால் கடத்தப்-படுகிறது. கடத்தப்பட்ட அந்த அக்னி புத்திரனை மீட்பதற்காக உளவுத்துறை இளைஞன் விக்ரம் களமிறங்குகிறான். கம்ப்யூட்டர் பெண் இஞ்சினியர் ப்ரீத்தி என்பவளுடன் சலாமியா என்கிற வினோத ராஜ்ஜியத்துக்கு பயணமாகிறான். ஏராளமாக ஒரு ராஜா, தாராளமாக ஒரு ராஜகுமாரி, வில்லன் ராஜகுரு என்று சலாமியாவில் பயணிக்கும் ஆக்ஷன் நிரம்பிய சாகச ஜிலு ஜிலு கதை. ‘விக்ரம்' என்ற பெயரில் கமல்ஹாசன் நடிப்பில் உருவான சினிமாவுக்காகவென்றே எழுதப்பட்ட இந்தக் கதை திரைப்படமாக உருவாகும்போதே ஷூட்டிங் புகைப்படங்களுடன் குமுதத்தில் தொடர்கதையாகவும் வந்து ஹிட் ஆனது.

Do you think a filmmaker from an earlier era would have given us the scene from Roja where Arvind Swamy’s mother speaks of his smoking habit as if it were a minor annoyance, perhaps ranking alongside a maidservant who doesn’t show up despite her previous-evening promises to be there first thing in the morning? And maybe that’s why Mani Ratnam worked so extensively with Sujatha, one Western sensibility in complete synchronicity with another. (So also Kamal Hassan, who collaborated with Sujatha on Tamil cinema’s first stab at a Bondian swashbuckler, Vikram.)

Anyway, coming back to Sujatha, here’s what I mean when I talk of his being with it, and with us: In a recent installment of his series in the magazine Kalki — the column was called Vaaram Oru Paasuram (loosely, ‘A Verse A Week’), where, each time, he’d pick a sacred hymn and lay it out in layman terms — he’d chosen a stanza from (the poet-saint) Nammazhvar’s Thiruvaimozhi, one that went Nalkuravum, selvum...

Now, this is what he does. Like that other Tamil instructor so beloved to those of a certain age — Maa. Nannan (from Doordarshan’s Vaazhkai Kalvi), who opened up to us a world of etymology and spelling and pronunciation, armed with nothing more than a piece of chalk, an easel-tilted blackboard and the patience of the ages — Sujatha first breaks down the verse word for word, stopping to intone, for instance, that “nalkuravu” is Old Tamil for “poverty.” Having approached the passage at a building-blocks level, Sujatha now stands back a little and talks about the most immediately apparent meaning, which is Nammazhvar’s contention that the image of the Lord he laid eyes on was an amalgamation of antonyms — poverty and wealth, poison and life-giving nectar, amity and enmity, hell and heaven — and therefore, He is (and is responsible for) everything. And after this is when Sujatha doffs his “Indian” hat — his truly reverential, emotional, subjective “Indian” hat; there’s not a note of condescension or scepticism in this robo-dog creator’s appraisal of the religious text at hand — and looks at things from a decidedly objective, “Western” perspective. He marvels that you could extrapolate this philosophy of God into the utmost extreme of antonyms: namely, if you think He exists, He exists; if you don’t, He doesn’t.

But because of His all-encompassing nature, even His non-existence is proof of His existence. And after this dizzying demonstration of circular reasoning, Sujatha signs his piece off with the Tamil equivalent of “the mind boggles,” capping off what could have been a fuddy-duddy exercise in esoteric academia with a cheeky flourish of hipness. And that’s why he’ll be missed — because, like few before him, he got us in touch with the uncoolest of things in the coolest of ways.

( Source: Sunday Express )


--Courtesy Sujatha Desikan

Down Memory Lane — Sujatha

Today’s posting is “Down Memory Lane” by Sujatha. This article featured in Nrisimhapriya August 2004 issue ( English Edition )

I have never been asked why I became a Tamil writer. Let me think..

I was born in Triplicane and almost from my cradle whisked off toSrirangam by my grandmother. My father was in a transferable job and this was the reason given for my early separation from my parents. Srirangam had its own oddities and charm.

Even now it has some, but today’s Srirangam is not my childhood town. Except for the inner Uttra and Chitra streets and the sanctum, every thing has changed irrevocably.

Every morning the Prabandam verses were afloat in our ears recited in a sing-song voice, by little Vishnava boys, thanks to aVedapathasala established by my ancestor Kuvalagudi Singam Iyengar. This was a Charity Trust for the children of poor Iyengar families. Young and bright-eyed boys were given sustenance, along with Upanishad’s and Diyva Prabandam lessons.

They were to learn them by heart before they were twelve. Then, they were sent into the world to fend for themselves. I followed some of them in later life. Three became cooks. One became an assistant director in Kodambakkam, another a brilliant teacher of Visishtadaita and yet another, an archaka in Vishnu temple at California.

The parthasala model education was not suitable for the modern world. The Trust had to revise the curriculum to enable the boys survive in the world.

Recently, when I visited Srirangam there were hardly any students. The Iyengar community has presumably become prosperous. But even today, the vestiges of the great tradition established in early eighth century and canonised later by Sri Ramanuja, remain.

When Lord Ranganatha comes out of the great temple the verses of Divyaprabandam precede Him. In Margazhi festival, the entire Thiruvaymozhi is recited in decadic from day and night. The temple is steeped in Tamil tradition. You will find even today there are individuals who know the entire four thousand verses by heart. Without much difficulty I can recall a few hundred verses.

The verses got embedded in my memory before I knew their meaning. In Srirangam, even today, you find people greeting each other in chaste Tamil terms like adiyen, devareer, thirumeni, etc., No wonder I became a Tamil Writer.

Srirangam Rajagopuram sketch by Sujatha Desikan (1993)