Charu Nivedita : A Rebel with a Vision

Charu Nivedita

Charu Nivedita, I heard this name for the first time only few months back. I was traveling with a french friend of mine who happens to be this literature geek and he was boring me with details about Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde among other things. All of a sudden he pops in the name ,Charu Nivedita. I found myself all ears to what he was talking about. Come on!, a french guy comparing some of the best English authors and playwrights and pops in an Indian sounding name in the same breath!! My curiosity grew and a real conversation started taking flight. I wanted to know more about this guy who was a Tamil writer and yet had found ardent fans in a community that does not understand a word of tamil. After hearing my friend’s highly animated description of Charu and his works, i started wondering, Does good literature really have no barriers?

I decided to do some more research on this guy and a simple google search with the name “Charu Nivedita” produced about 11000 results, huh! pretty decent. But after reading some of the top search results i started getting a feeling that my friend might have been mistaken or misinformed about this author and his literary skills. But one word stuck to my mind and kept repeating itself. “Sex”. That was the word found on ever single article about Charu and it was not posted in good light. People were attacking this poor guy left, right and center for his views about sex and liberalization. Since i found those posts highly biased, i decided to do some old-school research and bought his new book, ZERO DEGREE, that was translated from his tamil best seller that went by the same name . That was kind of a revelation for me. In the past 25 years, I have lived in as many as six countries and was immediately able to identify each character in Charu’s writings as the people i came across in different places, Charu had given a Tamil name to them, so that his Tamil readers could relate to it better. I was hooked!! This author has broken international language barriers and has given some of the best Global Tamil books ever.

But why was he disliked and disrespected by some of his colleagues from Tamil litarary world. No prizes for guessing!! The authors who had till now kept their readers inside a small circle and who’s writings for the past ten years have been about run-of-the-mill traditional values and society imposed cultural restrictions were losing steam. They were neither able to digest nor keep up with the fresh ideas that Charu was propagandizing. To make matters worse, Charu went a step ahead and released ebooks of most of his Tamil works, something that is unheard-of in the tamil literary world. This new venture helped the industry tap into sections of Tamil readers living out of India.

To summarize, Charu’s writings have been inspiring young ignited minds as opposed to the other So-Called giants of Tamil Literature who have been capitalizing on the cobwebs built around the minds of people who refuse to beleive that GLOBALISATION is the next big thing.

You can catch Charu Nivedita and his most recent articles on his website, www.charuonline.com .