Saturday, February 10, 2007

An appeal to my friend - read Kannada……..

An appeal to my friend - read Kannada……..

I was born and brought up in a small village of Karnataka. Kannada is the vernacular language, and I studied the same. That is my mother tongue too. There was no TV for entertainment. Only some village play, cricket and yakshagana ( a type of classical dance form). My grandfather had a small library in-house, called Sadhana Pustaka Bandara. Many books were there to read. I started reading with Dabu, a cartoon strip published in Kannada weekly Sudha. Later I read Kiriayara kana in the same magazine. By the third standard, I upgraded myself to read Chandamama it had great series like Moovaru manthrikaru, Rakksakolla, Papanna, many more stories. In between, my aunt left a trunk full of Amarachitrakata before they left for Algeria. It was great to fun to read from that, however many of them were in English, which I couldn’t read but I glanced through pictures. By the fifth standard, I was reading novels. I remember my first novel. It was entu koleya bhanta, by Narasihmayya. I recall that day, it was in May end, a day with heavy pre-monsoon rain with lightning and thunder. It was a great thrill to read that book. Later, I read many books by this author. Soon after, I shifted to thriller authors, some secret agent Mahesh; he had a knife Raja and a pistol Rani, so on so forth. By the time I reached the eighth standard, series Kannada translations of Telugu novels were available. They were very famous, especially of Yandamurivirendranath, Malldi. I could recollect few of them, duddu, duddu, beladingala bale, kappaanchu biliseragu much more. They thrilled me, and they are like Sidney Sheldon novels. But most of the time these stocks would be over, nothing to read, so I stared reading books from my grandfather's library. He had a great collection of Shivaram Karanth and many Bengali novels in Kannada. I read all of them. I liked Gora ( Tagore), marli mange, kanndiyalli kandata. One of the most excellent books ever read is Krishnavatara by Munshi, translated by Siddvanalli Krishna Sharma. Great book. I don’t know about original, but in Kannada, it is most wonderfully written. Many of the above books I may not be able to read now especially thriller fiction. But Krishnavatara is an all-time great book. Must be read in Kannada to enjoy the language.
I have a friend who is a voracious reader. He devours books whole. His reading range is vast, thriller to philosophy geography, freedom fighting, partition, filmmaking, economics and much more. Like me, his mother tongue is also Kannada. All these days he read only in English. English has vast literature; he must have never felt the shortage of literature. Maybe there was no need to read Kannada books. English books satisfied all his intellectual thrust. English is a great language, ever growing language and all language books are available in English. So why to read Kannada? Well, I am not a Kannada movement activist to tell around you should read and write only in Kannada. In fact, here in Mumbai, I am the most random member of Kannada organisation. Moreover, I  do not believe in this kind of enforcing a language or bias towards one language. What is the logic behind reading Kannada book? Each language is a representative of a culture and suitable for that culture and can be best expressed in that language. There are different words for certain things, which are endemic to that region. There is no translation for these words.
Well, forget about all these things. Tell me is it possible to translate D.R Bendre poems to English?, how we can impart Daravad kannad into it. How I can translate words like
“Antina nantu” it would be “sticky relationship” ha ha . How can I translate Dibbana . It is next to impossible. G.P.Rajratnam’s Rarnana padagalu, with a great flavour of Bangalore village language. The beauty lies in the voice of locality.
So friend, why don’t you read Kannada? Let us give a try. Start with simple language book like Krishnavathara . Read few pages per day. Carry this book everywhere so you may tend to read one or two pages while drinking coffee in some Dharshini. Maybe Krishna or Bhima take you away to Dwaparayuga . Just like, it happened to me when I started reading English in Readers Digest. Sometimes just I got carried away and for a moment and just forgot which language I was reading in. Let us take a fascinating novel like Hamsaraga or Thirugubana by Ta Ra Su. and travel around Chithradhurga. Maybe sometime you should know Masti. He achieved a significant level of simplicity in writing. But sometime back, you had told me you don’t like something put simplistically. But here is a simple, straightforward narration except for the complex relationships they handle.
I am here, expecting your call, someday you may call and tell “Batta, I finished with this Kannada book and it was a great experience to read”.