KN is also an enthusiastic traveller, trekking in Himalayas being a favourite hobby. Steeped in South Indian history, its arts and culture, KN is an avid reader of all the novels “Kalki” wrote, and is an accomplished player o of the percussion instrument the mridangam. He has occupied a number of important positions like the President of the Association of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, President of the Automobile Research Association of India, Chairman of the Southern Region of the Association of Indian Engineering Industry, Member of the Senate of the Annamalai University.

He is an industrialist and heads companies that manufacture automobile components. “It was as if Kalki himself rendered his great work in English.”Īn engineer by profession, Karthik Narayanan (1938) was born in Calcutta and had his early education in Tuticorin. They did and said “This is the best you can do in English.” The work culminated not when the book was released by a former Central Minister in 2016, not even when it went for three editions but when an ardent fan of Kalki sent a mail to me in 2019. I gave it to two of my friends, who had read the original more than sixty times, with a mandate to read them in one go. We got ready rough copies of two volumes. Finally the hard copy was ready for publication in 2016. There were issues where we could not reach a consensus easily. I read and re-read the first draft a dozen times before handing it over to my editors. That explains the six long years I spent for this project. I let the translation work progress in its own pace. But most of them, though done with utmost sincerity, failed to create the emotional bond with the readers which the original author had effortlessly done in the Fifties when Ponniyin Selvan was serialised in a popular magazine. Reason: there were already many translations around. One potential publisher even lured me with an offer to translate another work of Kalki. When I started translating Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan in 2010, blissfully unaware of the depth and the magnitude of the work, several people tried to dissuade me.

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