Neela Padmanabhan is well known as a leading short story writer and novelist in Tamil. Very few people, however, know him as a poet. A select band of people know show he uses poetry to present the pains that the vast majority of the populace endures, to reflect his own anguish at society’s imbalances, injustices and iniquities. He laments the fragile structure of modern society, racked by the politics of power that pervades even the field of literature. He derides the double talk that elite indulges in, sneers at the dubious deals that people strike and their vulgar display of wealth and power. His poems, most of them short, carry the decocted wisdom of a poet whose heart is lacerated by the steady erosion of the old value system built on the essence of Indian culture and tradition. The poems, translated from Tamil, secure for Neela Padmanabhan a place of honour amongst the finest poets of our times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Neela Padmanabhan
Neela Padmanabhan is a leading figure in the arena of Tamil Literature. An engineer by profession, a humanist by instinct, he has straddled the scene like a Colossus, producing novels, short stories and poems and critical essays that have found warm reception from the readers. He wrested from the Tamil spoken in the districts of former Madras Presidency and hence considered to be hybrid. From then on, he never looked back. His pen responded to the outpouring of a pained heart lacerated by a million wounds, troubled by a trillion aches, not necessarily his own, but of society at large. If these are not the ideal spirit of great literature, what else is! Neela has a spiritual bend of mind. His quest for the eternal and the permanent finds expression in his writings. His writing is of the people, but not for all the people. It is for the discerning, for those who are ready to crack the hard shell to get the real essence of wisdom inlaid. Awards and honours, he had reaped in abundance. He was on the Tamil Advisory Panel of the Central Sahitya Akademi where his work left a deep imprint. At 65, he stands at the height of his power. His thin frame and pinched face, with a flowing beard, set with burning eyes, gives him the image of a karmayogi.
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