RIP Sujatha

Writer/ Technologist/ Critic Sujatha (Rangarajan) has passed on to the Other Side. The thamizh writing landscape will never be the same without Sujatha. Sci-fi (Juno, the AI dog and a dystopian future), hero-and-wisecracking-sidekick (Ganesh & Vasanth), his innumerable twist-in-tale short stories (thoondil kadhaigal), technology articles (yen edharku eppadi), his movie adaptations - which didn't turn out as good as the books (Priya, Vikram), his critiques (katradhum petradhum), his innovations (being part of the team that worked on Electronic Voting Machines), his screenwriting abilities (almost all kamal and shankar movies have his strong influence) - Sujatha's work is a myriad collection of many genres.



Despite the legions of his fans, I will always think of him as an unsung hero who never got his due. He was well ahead of his peers in his writing . Just like many other wonderful books, the directors who adapted his works to movies or tv shows never got close to where Sujatha would have set them to be. His sci-fi novels did not set the thamizh sci-fi scene on fire. If only Sujatha was born either in Europe or in the United States, he would have been hailed as one of the greatest writers of his time, with most of us reading his paperbacks on airplanes. But in one of the cliched cruelties of time, for his country, Sujatha probably came a generation too early (rather, we, as fans, came a generation late).

Looking at my reading habits now, I can see it bears Sujatha's influence. I always hoped to send him some of my short stories (rather, what _I_ call short stories) and hoped to receive a "they suck totally, but hey, thats a start" comment from him, only to get back and write at least one story that would be readable so that I can tell him that he was indeed an inspiration.

Find infinite peace wherever you are, Sujatha. You will always be remembered by a billion Ekalyvas.