Narendra Madhuranthakam

To be or not to be was the question I dallied with when I received the invitation from Shinie    Antony, the    co-founder of Bangalore Literary Festival to be a participant of this year’s festival    and the reason was nothing but the literary turmoil going around across the country at present. Many illustrious writers recently retuned their awards given by the Sahithya Akademy in protest of the murders of the writers by the fanatics and the growing intolerance prevailing in the country, some people questioned those writer’s integrity by declaring that intolerance and homicides are not recent up comings as they persisted in the past as well    and the spokesmen of the government raised the slogan, award-vapsee in the lines of ghar-vapsee. Thus the situation was hot and volatile and who knows the literary festival may become a stage for unforeseen controversies. But the desire to feel the pulse of the writers and readers prevailed over my misgivin...

Barampuram, which is also called Berhampur and Brahmapur, is a small town in the state of Odisha . It is around 150kms away from Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha and just 20kms from the border of Andhra Pradesh. As it is on the railway track in between Kolkata and Vizianagaram, it is obvious that the spirit of Renaissance flourished at Kolkata during the 19 th  century reached Vizianagaram through its gateway. Gidugu Ramamurthy Panthulu the champion of Telugu Vyavharihika Basha (colloquial language) and the classmate of Gurajada Apparao, the epoch-maker of Modern Telugu literature, lived there.    Gidugu Sithapati, the son of Gidugu Ramamurthy Panthulu led a movement to join the taluq of Parlakimidi in Andhra Pradesh after the Independence as Telugu is the mother tongue of more than half of its population. V.V.Giri, our former President was also a Telugu man born and brought up in Berhampur. I got an opportunity to visit Berhampur recently when Vijaychandra, a noted poe...

“Those green mountain peaks, having quested for the white cloud which covered the blue sky like a grandeurs veil and then exhausted and caved down into a valley, were like nakedly sleeping lonely maidens. The forest all around was like the undressed hair reflecting tragedy. Like the intertwined tresses the trunks of awkward trees and    broken trunks… the scars on the black stones made of rain water…      the diffused shadows of the clouds between the peaks that remind one of    the illusion of desire that unfurls before the eyes    opened from darkness    … the road that gets disappeared after meandering like the tears that flow between the breasts…and the half    dried rivulet…as if stooping the heads    and looking down at their feet having got abashed of their beauty… down, further down…down and downer… that scene drooping down to the nether world and that experience is the valley of Araku…” Thus begins the s...

He is popularly called C K and his full name is C K Narayana Reddy. Vallampati Venkatasubbaiah, the noted critic of Telugu literature and a friend of my father used to refer to CK and his commitment with Communist ideology frequently. I was only a boy of 5 years when CK was the MLA of the then our constituency, Piler and he settled down in Hyderabad by the time I joined the Junior College and hence I never had the opportunity of meeting him in person. But I have been reading the books he published right from 1973 and learnt many things about him through my friends. I have been eager to learn more about CK as many revered him as our local hero. A recent book published by Hyderabad Book Trust, “Nenu Communisttuni” a biography of CK fulfilled my desire to know more about him to a certain extent. Born in a feudal family of farmers that contained more than 100 acres in a small village near Piler in Chittoor district, CK had his schooling in Tirupati and Madanapalli. He despised discriminati...

I met Chaganti     somayajulu who is popularly known as Chaso thrice. The first time was when Kalipatnam Ramarao, the doyen of Telugu Short Story , took me to Vizianagaram, way back in 1985, to show me the historic town , the citadel     of Telugu culture    which produced many heralds of modern Telugu literature and other fine arts like Gurajada Apparao and Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu . As it was the lunch time Chaso invited us to the lunch and so I joined him as Ramarao used to take meal only twice in the day and always skipped the lunch. It was a typical middle class Brahmin lunch, rice, Gongura, dhal, ghee, vegetables and curd. While we were eating Chaso was enquiring many things, not about literature, casually. After the lunch he enjoyed a cheroot and before he set out for a siesta, we took leave of him. I met Chaso in Visalandhra Book Shop in the main bazaar road of Tirupati on an evening around 7 P. M. after a few years. By then Chaganti Sankar, Chaso’...

“I have been a regular reader to Andhra Pathrika since 1947. Then I learnt about Bharathi monthly and I began to study its back numbers also. Now I imagine that the reader in me might have transformed into a writer in the due course very much like the old patient getting metamorphosed into a doctor. We have a proverb in Telugu that the story goes to Kanchi and then we return to our house. But by the time I began writing stories most of the stories which were written at that time were reaching 17, Thambuchetty Street, Madras. Thus I deem it a privilege to be a product of the experiment of creating and molding a writer  conducted by the Journalistic family of Andhra Pathrika by illustrating what a good story is through the publication of good stories, rejecting some to reflect how should not be one is, requesting the writer to send his contribution soon as the readers are imploring for, selecting the story which was sent to the weekly for the monthly, soliciting the stories for ...