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BS Murthy
I’m an Indian novelist, playwright, short story, non-fiction 'n articles writer, translator, a 'little' thinker and a budding philosopher in ‘Addendum to Evolution: Origins of the World by Eastern Speculative Philosophy’ that was originally published in The Examined Life On-Line Philosophy Journal, Vol. 05 Issue 18, Summer 2004.
Born on 27 Aug 1948 and having been schooled in letter-writing, in my mid thirties, I happened to articulate my managerial ideas in thirty-odd published articles, and later penned Benign Flame: Saga of Love, Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life, Crossing the Mirage: Passing through youth (plot and character driven novels), Glaring Shadow: A stream of consciousness novel, Prey on the Prowl: A Crime Novel, Of No Avail: Web of Wedlock, a novella, Stories Varied: A Book of Short Stories and Onto the Stage: Slighted Souls and other stage and radio plays.
Besides Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘n More), a ‘novel’ narrative, possibly in a new genre, and the critique Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation) in the arena of non-fiction, my literary endeavours in the translation zone had been the versification of the Sanskrit epics, Vyasa’s Bhagvad-Gita as Treatise of self-help and Valmiki’s Sundara Kãnda as Hanuman’s Odyssey in contemporary English idiom,
Later, as a prodigal son, I took to my mother tongue, Telugu, to craft the short story తప్పటడుగులు (Missteps)
Whereas my fiction had emanated from my conviction that for it to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil but not the hotchpotch of local and alien caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, all my body of work was borne out of my passion for writing, matched only by my love for language.
MY body of work as above is in the public domain as free ebooks https://g.co/kgs/VuBNJ1
Moreover, some of my articles on management issues, general insurance topics, literary matters, and political affairs published in The Hindu, The Economic Times, The Financial Express. The Purchase, The Insurance Times, Triveni , Boloji.com are reproduced in Academia.edu
I, a graduate mechanical engineer from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India, had been a Hyderabad-based Insurance Surveyor and Loss Assessor from 1986 - 2021.
Media and Literature
Being a land of many languages, India’s media is no monolithic phenomenon. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the regional differences, the vernacular media has a uniformity of character. Thus we can broadly categorize the Indian media into the English version and the vernacular variety. The difference between these is more pronounced in the ‘space value’ of the print media than in the ‘airtime quality’ of the electronic variant.Over to the English print media first. The lament of the learned is that sparse is the space for literature in it. And their nostalgia is for the media that propped up fiction through its columns in the golden era of the novel in Europe. After all, weren’t the...
State of Art
The Indian legend has it that goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi respectively bestow wealth and learning on earth. It was the belief that both the goddesses would never bless the same soul. Such was their mythical rivalry that each would deny her munificence to the one under the other’s patronage. In the popular perception, the phenomenon of the rich merchant and the poor pundit was supposedly the manifestation of the goddesses at odds. Thus, the merchant accumulated wealth, however contributing to the commerce, while the pundit enriched society through his knowledge, himself remaining impoverished, nevertheless, both seemed reconciled to the enmity of their respective patrons in heaven as t...
On Writing ‘n the Writers
In his savage state, mere sounds could have been man’s communicative tools to vent out his raw feelings, limited to such as hunger and anger and pain and pleasure. However, in time, as he managed to civilize himself in communes, he would have needed some vocabulary to synchronize the habitation therein. And in that lies the seeds of the tongues, which, when whetted by the tenor of the times, could have yielded the fruits of languages. But it was the character of life, as it evolved in a given commune that would have shaped the nuances of the words, leading to the evolution of languages with their unique characteristics of expression in personal interactions and public communions. While at ...
To Be The Land Of A Thousand Classics
The universal success of The God of Small Things and the exuberant outburst of Salman Rushdie on ‘regional’ Indian writing call for a dispassionate approach to the genesis of Indo-English writing, nay, all Indian writing. Let us first propitiate the ‘God of Small Things’ before we turn our attention to the ‘Satan of Verses’As Arundhati Roy’s success is of historical magnitude, it would be in order to follow the Gibbonian track to seek its causes. To this enquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned|: that it was owing to the newness of ‘The God of Small things’, exemplifies by the peculiar and pixilated use of the language to weave a sensuous story in a sinuso...
The Unfounded Hindu Slavery
No less than Narendra Modi, India’s erudite prime minister, had attributed the self-disparaging Indian character to its thousand years of slavery, that too on the floor of the Indian parliament. And it’s no wonder that Asaduddin Owaisi, the Islamist revivalist in the Indian remnant, promptly contested the said proposition. Needless to say, while Modi echoed the lament of the Hindu nationalists, albeit in a politically correct vocabulary, Owaisi sees the Muslim invasion of Hindustan through the prism of eight-hundred years of Islamic hukummat over the same. Whatever, a critical examination of India’s Islamic history, even the one dished out by its Muslim overlords, and an objective anal...
Back to Square One on the Writing Board
So to say, in its origins, the writing board consisted the ‘rectangles of recognition’ over which, over time, the ‘pillars of popularity’ were formed that held the interests of the literature and the writers alike for long. However, in the later part of the last century, this ‘from bottom to top’ order was turned topsy-turvy under the ‘pyramids of publicity’ erected by the publisher-media nexus to promote the writers with the right connections. When it seemed, all was irrevocably lost to the unconnected authors, came the internet to usher in the e-book revolution followed by social media explosion that once again restored the rectangles of recognition, albeit in unruly profus...
Hindu Theocratic State – Canard of the Libtards
After the millennia grind under foreign yokes, first that of the Islamic invaders and then of the British colonizers, Bharat Varsha, the ancient land of the Hindus, regained its independence as India, albeit downsized by the latter by carving out Pakistan from it as a homeland for its Muslims. Thus, it would have been logical that the Hindus had the truncated India all for themselves but owing to its wooly political leadership, it was not to be, which forever constrains them to drink the same old wine in a new bottle. What’s worse was Nehru’s nipping the Hindu nationalistic impulses in the bud, perceiving them as offensive to the religious sentiments of the Muslim minority that made Indi...
Have Hindus Become More Intolerant, Or less Indulgent?
When the Semitic free run on the Hindu turf under Sonia’s proxy watch ended with the ascent of Narendra Modi onto the Delhi gaddi, the Indian agendas of the Christian west and the Muslim umma faced impediments resulting in the brouhaha over the growing religious intolerance of Hindus towards India’s minorities. Given the racial biases and the religious prejudices of both against the Hindus and that the world media, by and large is controlled by them, a critical appraisal of their propaganda with objective lenses is called for.Hence, as the accusation is on the religious ground, it is imperative that the theocratic credos of Islam and Christianity as well as the philosophical ethos of san...
Semitic Censure Of Sanatana Dharma, Or The Pot Calling The Kettle Black
Unmindful of the old adage, when you point a finger at someone else, there are three pointing back to you, Udhayanidhi, the Christian son of the atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin and his devout Hindu wife, had raged an unseemly controversy through his clarion call for the eradication of sanatana dharma aka Hinduism that he likened to dengue, malaria and corona. It is another matter though that he has no issues with the ethics of the Christianity that required him to get baptized into its fold to wed his believing beloved. Be that as it may, his closet Christian party colleague A. Raja pitched in with AIDS and leprosy tags to picture Hinduism as a menace to the world at large fo...
A Sense of Contribution - The Source of Fulfillment
In the days of yore, land was the only resource available for man to have a say in the material aspects of life, and as for the land-less, neither ambition nor resentment was of any avail to get even in the universality of inequality. What is worse, as envy and caprice only make it worse, the wise among the have-nots learned to cultivate contentment in their minds to mend their resource-less lives, and even the less resourceful ones, relatively speaking that is. Thus emerged the old adage – contentment is the finest thing in the world – to lend peace of mind to the lacking millions by way of a stoical philosophy. Nonetheless, one’s reconciliation with the deprivations that contentment ...
Domain of the Devil - A Satire on Publishing Industry
When at length, Suresh was finding his moorings at Tihar; Subba Rau was brought in to a near stampede there. Why not, the whole nation knew him by then as the man who had pricked at the Premier’s face. When Suresh enquired what the fuss was all about, Rau said it was but a ‘literary coup’. Probed by Suresh for an account, Rau unfolded the story of his life and times as an unpublished writer.In his mid-forties, Rau was seized with an urge to bring himself onto the fictional stage. So to lend scope for his boundless creativity, he chose the vastness of the ‘novel’ as the setting. And for the medium of expression, he bypassed his mother tongue, Telugu, the Italian of the East. Instead...
New Light on India’s Plight
‘What ails India’ has been the subject matter of the left-lib right-wing tussle for long, what with the cynics chipping in, in between. However, the right-wing assault on the left-lib ‘Idea of India’, facilitated by Narendra Modi’s nationalist rise in the Indian political firmament, has only increased the intensity of the scrimmage. Be that as it may, this is to throw a new ‘right’ light on India’s ‘left’ plight that has been Bharat’s bane, for a fresh look at it. In Kitab al-Hind, Al-Biruni had stated that “the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs”, and...
On Attitude to Money
While a conflict of interest, be it in life or in fiction, can bring about self-introspection, strange though it may seem, a casual encounter could lead to self-discovery. So it happened with me in the wake of my rebuff to a dogged tempter, “money is not my weakness” and his “what is your weakness” repartee; for the record, either I had been a straight purchase officer or a strict loss assessor, occupations amenable to monetary mischief. However, the idea of this article is not to gloat over my uprightness but to present the genesis of my attitude to money and the vicissitudes of my life as a subject matter for possible research. But the caveat is that much of my growing up that...
My maiden 'Novel' blues
After letting me pen over a score of articles, though my muse prompted me to enter into the arena of fiction, yet it made me struggle to come up with the opening lines of my maiden novel for over ten days or so before “That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train. On that, in the S-3, were the Ramaiahs with their nine year-old daughter Roopa.”But then “the train stopped at a village station, as though to disrupt Roopa’s daydreams of ...
My ‘Novel’ Account of Human Possibility
Whenever I look at my body of work of ten books, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not. I was born into a land-owning family in a remote village of Andhra Pradesh in India that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from there, but much before the rural education mechanism was geared up. It was thus the circumstances of my birth enabled me to escape from the tiresome chores of the primary schooling till I had a nine-year fill of an unbridled childhood, embellished by village plays and grandma’s tales, made all the more interesting by her uncanny ability for storytelling. As my maternal grandfather’s grandfather happened to be a poet laureate at t...
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BS Murthy
What are some books or authors that you would recommend to our readers?I would like to pass on the advice of my maternal uncle, C. Subba Rao, gave me in my youth that one should begin his reading life with classics for they deepen the thinking, and broaden the outlook besides improving one’s language.Having fortunately heeded to his advice, later on in life, when I thanked him for his advice that benefited me immensely, he said that he merely passed on his father’s advice to him, which makes me indebted to my maternal grandfather C. Kameswara Rao as well.So, I recommend readers to read the classics of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Emily Zola, Gustav Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil et al that is besides my body of work ...View More