Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, a Tamil who wrote in Kannada, lived up to a hundred years. Around Independence, anyone crossing 50 was considered old and his disappearance wasn’t considered unnatural. A whole range of Tamil writers from Pudumaipittan to Ku Pa Rajagopalan to T Janakiraman passed away well before they could touch 60. The terms immortality and belonging to posterity, etc, are frequently bandied about terms in writing about the contemporary writing scene. One only has to look into a 10-year-old ‘Who’s Who’ of writers to realise how short is the impact of a writer. They say of a film director that he is as good as his last film. The same holds good for the writer also.
The children and grand-children of Dr (Indira) R Parthasarathy celebrated his 80th birthday on July 10. Many friends and well-wishers gathered on the occasion to greet him a long and active life. When one reflects about his beginnings and growing up as a writer, one will be justifiably amazed. Parthasarathy studied Tamil and English at the post-graduate level. As an academic, he should have been wary of an ‘aberration’ called modern writing. But despite teaching classical Tamil, he took to contemporary writing; first short stories; a little later, novels and from 1970 onwards he also began writing plays. Today, Parthasarathy is as famous for his prose fiction as he is for his plays. He is the only Indian writer to have been honoured by both the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi.
Full report here New Indian Express
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