Writer Sujatha is dead.


I'm not a particularly big fan of his work. Nor am I well-acquainted with it. I watched his futuristic En Iniya Iyandhira which used to air on DD-5 in the pre-cable part of the '90s and thought it the epitome of cool. People in it slept on water beds! And Gino, the robot dog (which every child that watched the show dreamed of owning)!

Have only read one of his books- Pesum Bommaigal, a sci-fi novel that features the lawyer/detectives, Ganesh and Vasant, thus marrying the two genres he specialised in writing. Reasonably entertaining, but derivative. And of course, there were the Ganesh/Vasant adaptations on Sun TV(monday nights at 9, was it?) and the dialogue he wrote for such movies as Mudhalvan and Boys.

He was a friend of my father's, so I knew him a little, you see. I remember visiting him and his wife in their flat. Also in Kutralam where he'd come to write undisturbed, and where we took him to the excellent, but now sadly defunct Shankar's mess (Shankar served, while his mother cooked over a wood fire, as a result of which the tiny place was suffused with smoke). He went into ecstasies over his adai, and wrote about it in Kumudham/Ananda Vikatan, even.

I feel a little sad to see him go.