Do you know Tamil? Have you ever read any of my works?” Sujatha asked, half an hour into our conversation.

Nothing unusual. Generations of young, globalised Tamils were taught to read the language by introducing them to the works of Sujatha. For the rest, he was S. Rangarajan, the equally inventive man of science who worked in ISRO, BHEL, Bangalore, or best introduced as the man who led the team that designed the Electronic Voting Machine in India and who shared the scientific spirit and world vision of his mate, former president Abdul Kalam at St Joseph’s College, Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, as also the script writer of Rajnikanth’s last monster hit, Sivaji, and the writer who was called the Isaac Asimov of Tamil literature.

I slipped into speaking Tamil and asked, “Why don’t you ever write in English?”

“I can, but I belong to a generation that thinks in Tamil though conversant with English”, he explained.

Since the 1970s, for the generation of Tamils that was rapidly Anglicised and who jettisoned orthodox aspects of Tamil traditions and found the literary canons of another age turgid, Sujatha was a modern avatar in contemporary Tamil literature. His oeuvre was eclectic as were his interests, his vocation and his incessant need to write. He wrote on current themes, of a nostalgic past and a distant future, social mores and trends with an ease and self-assuredness that was hard to beat. He was engaging, intelligent, informative, witty, wicked, provocative and profound as the occasion demanded or as his muse dictated him.

... contd.