We Die but Once

T.K. Mahadevan is a wide spectrum writer/editor/broadcaster of long standing. He wrote this novel – his second – when he was 28 years old. Like everything that he has written over these many years, it is brazenly original and un-inhibited. No reader, howsoever sophisticated, will find it easy to ward off its calculated assault on his set ideas and emotions. Its deliberately syncopated style is off a piece with the author’s known penchant for innovation in the art of verbal communication. When asked to articulate its intended impact on the reader, he once said: “Listen to Richard Strauss’s orchestral work Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration)”. We Die But Once is, of course, not everybody’s cup of tea. But it will strike a resonant chord, with unmistakable clarity, in well-endowed minds which have deeply pondered the never-to-be-resolved mystery of Life and Death and rejected all nostrums, preferring to remain in defeat and despair rather than seek comfort in unfalsifiable dogmas.