KiRa inscribed a new landscape on the literary map
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Remembering Ki. Rajanarayanan, wordsmith and joyous chronicler of life
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Remembering Ki. Rajanarayanan, wordsmith and joyous chronicler of life
The transformation of Rayangala Srikrishna Rajanarayana Perumal Ramanujam Naicker into the writer Ki. Rajanarayanan (KiRa) followed a most unlikely path. A late bloomer, who did not write much until his late 30s, got the honour of a state funeral, denied even to R.K. Narayan and Jayakanthan and which the government of Tamil Nadu usually reserves for filmstars. Consumptive in his youth, the timely discovery of streptomycin saved him, and KiRa died shy of his centenary, alert in body and mind. He dropped out of school in Class VII, entering a school building only when caught in the rains in a twist to the Tamil saying, KiRa would add that even then he ended up watching the downpour but ended up as a university professor. In a notoriously petty literary wo