The tension between ambition and idealism is a nagging one. tells me that I’ve read too much, asks me to think for myself. that nothing to me is valid unless I can find a great writer to have said it earlier.” Or again: “GS Rao. He is acutely aware that his erudition runs the risk of turning into mere bookishness: “Ratna. We have no purpose, no politics.” Or again: “Why am I not impressive, witty, handsome, skillful.? O to be. He writes: “There are hundreds of young men like me in India. I’m morally feckless too.” Ten years later, he describes himself “as serious, often humourless, intense, inept”. In 1951, he rues: “I’m neither regular nor daring. AKR is not merely candid and unsparing he can be positively self-flagellating. One is the simple consolation of knowing that corrosive self-doubt can assail even the most fêted writers. Why does this book tick? Several reasons. Its greatest contribution is to reveal how Ramanujan’s impressive oeuvre was yoked to an unrelenting quest for self-discovery - indeed, for wholeness.

Jointly edited by AKR’s son, Krishna, and scholar, Guillermo Rodriguez, this compilation of diaries from over five decades will interest poets, researchers and AKR aficionados. Would this mean wading through reams of leaden prose - or what modern-day lingo so succinctly terms TMI? Which made me approach his recently published diaries ( Hymns for the Drowning would probably rank among my top five volumes of mystical poetry in the world.Īlthough he died prematurely at the age of 64 in 1993, AKR’s work endures. Ramanujan (AKR) infuses living sap into Nammalvar. It takes an extraordinary poet to make a thousand years seem a mere heartbeat away. It takes an accomplished poet to make a long-dead poet relevant in translation. There’s more.”īut it was when revisiting his translations of the mystic, Nammalvar, that my admiration turned to awe. “Look,” his work seems to say, “There’s more. Always a step ahead of his reader, his essays, translations and poems continue to point to a tantalising spectrum of traditions, approaches, possibilities. Culturally sophisticated, intellectually exploratory, never doctrinaire, he is both pathfinder and trailblazer. Ramanujan’s presence in Indian letters is canonical.

Hymns for the Drowning by Nammalvar