BS Murthy

I’m an Indian novelist, playwright, short story, non-fiction 'n articles writer, translator, a 'little' thinker and a budding philosopher in ‘Addendum to Evolution: Origins of the World by Eastern Speculative Philosophy’ that was originally published in The Examined Life On-Line Philosophy Journal, Vol. 05 Issue 18, Summer 2004.

Born on 27 Aug 1948 and having been schooled in letter-writing, in my mid thirties, I happened to articulate my managerial ideas in thirty-odd published articles, and later penned Benign Flame: Saga of Love, Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life, Crossing the Mirage: Passing through youth (plot and character driven novels), Glaring Shadow: A stream of consciousness novel, Prey on the Prowl: A Crime Novel, Of No Avail: Web of Wedlock, a novella, Stories Varied: A Book of Short Stories and Onto the Stage: Slighted Souls and other stage and radio plays.

Besides Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘n More), a ‘novel’ narrative, possibly in a new genre, and the critique Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation) in the arena of non-fiction, my literary endeavours in the translation zone had been the versification of the Sanskrit epics, Vyasa’s Bhagvad-Gita as Treatise of self-help and Valmiki’s Sundara Kãnda as Hanuman’s Odyssey in contemporary English idiom,

Later, as a prodigal son, I took to my mother tongue, Telugu, to craft the short story తప్పటడుగులు (Missteps)

Whereas my fiction had emanated from my conviction that for it to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil but not the hotchpotch of local and alien caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, all my body of work was borne out of my passion for writing, matched only by my love for language.

MY body of work as above is in the public domain as free ebooks in umpteen sites

Moreover, some of my articles on management issues, general insurance topics, literary matters, and political affairs published in The Hindu, The Economic Times, The Financial Express. The Purchase, The Insurance Times, Triveni , Boloji.com are reproduced in Academia.edu

https://independent.academia.edu/BulusuSMurthy

I, a graduate mechanical engineer from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India, had been a Hyderabad-based Insurance Surveyor and Loss Assessor from 1986 - 2021.

Benign Flame: Saga of Love

The attractions Roopa experienced and the fantasies she entertained as a teen shaped a male imagery that ensconced her subconscious. Insensibly, confident carriage came to be associated with the image of maleness in her mind-set. Her acute consciousness of masculinity only increased her vulnerability to it, making her womanliness crave for the maleness for its gratification.However, as her father was constrained to help her in becoming a doctor, she opts to marry, hoping that Sathyam might serve her cause though the persona she envisioned as masculine, she found lacking in him. But as he fails to go with her idea, she becomes apathetic towards him, and insensibly sinks into her friend Sandhy...

On Pitfalls of Pre-marital Sex

When Roopa debunked the puranic tales of cock-pecked wives as perverse male stratagems to enslave women, her mother was truly alarmed.“These tales of female fidelity have a purpose of their own,” said Janaki to Roopa. “Since nature made men promiscuous, it’s the female loyalty that holds the marriage in the long run, for the benefit of the family and the society as well. These tales have a moral for men as well for they underscore the fact that it’s the wife who sticks through thick and thin with their man and not the lascivious lasses with whom they come to stray.”As Roopa remained unconvinced and minced no words about the fallacy of the proposition, Janaki realized that old wiv...

Ramaiah’s Matrimonial Advice to His Daughter

“Why not look for another match?” said Roopa sounding pleading.“But why reject this one,” Ramaiah seemed persuasive.“No, he’s not my man,” said Roopa wishing that they spared her.“Maybe, he’s a simpleton, but do realize that he’s young and has a long way to go,” said Ramaiah, who seemed to have read his daughter’s mind.‘If something isn’t presentable at its ninety per cent, it wouldn’t be much different either at cent per cent,’ thought Roopa but to buy time she said,“Give me some time to think.”However, after dinner, Ramaiah went up to a brooding Roopa in the verandah.“If you’re not interested in this match, so be it, but if I don’t show you, life a...

To Be The Land Of A Thousand Classics

The universal success of The God of Small Things and the exuberant outburst of Salman Rushdie on ‘regional’ Indian writing call for a dispassionate approach to the genesis of Indo-English writing, nay, all Indian writing. Let us first propitiate the ‘God of Small Things’ before we turn our attention to the ‘Satan of Verses’As Arundhati Roy’s success is of historical magnitude, it would be in order to follow the Gibbonian track to seek its causes. To this enquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned|: that it was owing to the newness of ‘The God of Small things’, exemplifies by the peculiar and pixilated use of the language to weave a sensuous story in a sinuso...

Media and Literature

Being a land of many languages, India’s media is no monolithic phenomenon. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the regional differences, the vernacular media has a uniformity of character. Thus we can broadly categorize the Indian media into the English version and the vernacular variety. The difference between these is more pronounced in the ‘space value’ of the print media than in the ‘airtime quality’ of the electronic variant.Over to the English print media first. The lament of the learned is that sparse is the space for literature in it. And their nostalgia is for the media that propped up fiction through its columns in the golden era of the novel in Europe. After all, weren’t the...

State of Art

The Indian legend has it that goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswathi respectively bestow wealth and learning on earth. It was the belief that both the goddesses would never bless the same soul. Such was their mythical rivalry that each would deny her munificence to the one under the other’s patronage. In the popular perception, the phenomenon of the rich merchant and the poor pundit was supposedly the manifestation of the goddesses at odds. Thus, the merchant accumulated wealth, however contributing to the commerce, while the pundit enriched society through his knowledge, himself remaining impoverished, nevertheless, both seemed reconciled to the enmity of their respective patrons in heaven as t...

How Good is the Indian Muse?

Where to look for the soul of India in print, or now in digital mode? Is it in the writings of those for whom the muse is their mother tongue or those who happen to muse in the alien English? Where to savour the flavour of Indian life in fictional form? Is it in that ‘stronger and more important body of work of Indian writers working in English’ as trumpeted by Salman Rushdie or in the supposedly ‘true to life’ depictions (not the same thing as the examination of the human condition) on the variegate canvas of regional languages penned by the vernacular writers? And certainly, it is an overkill on the part of the bhasha writers to suggest, as was done, that ‘an...

On Writing ‘n the Writers

In his savage state, mere sounds could have been man’s communicative tools to vent out his raw feelings, limited to such as hunger and anger and pain and pleasure. However, in time, as he managed to civilize himself in communes, he would have needed some vocabulary to synchronize the habitation therein. And in that lies the seeds of the tongues, which, when whetted by the tenor of the times, could have yielded the fruits of languages. But it was the character of life, as it evolved in a given commune that would have shaped the nuances of the words, leading to the evolution of languages with their unique characteristics of expression in personal interactions and public communions. While at ...

Domain of the Devil – A Satire on Indian Publishing

When at length, Suresh was finding his moorings at Tihar; Subba Rau was brought in to a near stampede there. Why not, the whole nation knew him by then as the man who had pricked at the Premier’s face. When Suresh enquired what the fuss was all about, Rau said it was but a ‘literary coup’. Probed by Suresh for an account, Rau unfolded the story of his life and times as an unpublished writer.In his mid-forties, Rau was seized with an urge to bring himself onto the fictional stage. So to lend scope for his boundless creativity, he chose the vastness of the ‘novel’ as the setting. And for the medium of expression, he bypassed his mother tongue, Telugu, the Italian of the East. Instead...

A Sense of Contribut ion - The Source of Fulfillment

In the days of yore, land was the only resource available for man to have a say in the material aspects of life, and as for the land-less, neither ambition nor resentment was of any avail to get even in the universality of inequality. What is worse, as envy and caprice only make it worse, the wise among the have-nots learned to cultivate contentment in their minds to mend their resource-less lives, and even the less resourceful ones, relatively speaking that is. Thus emerged the old adage - contentment is the finest thing in the world - to lend peace of mind to the lacking millions by way of a stoical philosophy. Nonetheless, one’s reconciliation with the deprivations that contentmen...

On Attitude to Money

While a conflict of interest, be it in life or in fiction, can bring about self-introspection, strange though it may seem, a casual encounter could lead to self-discovery. So it happened with me in the wake of my rebuff to a dogged tempter, “money is not my weakness” and his “what is your weakness” repartee; for the record, either I had been a straight purchase officer or a strict loss assessor, occupations amenable to monetary mischief. However, the idea of this article is not to gloat over my uprightness but to present the genesis of my attitude to money and the vicissitudes of my life as a subject matter for possible research. But the caveat is that much of my growing up that...

My maiden 'Novel' blues

After letting me pen over a score of articles, though my muse prompted me to enter into the arena of fiction, yet it made me struggle to come up with the opening lines of my maiden novel for over ten days or so before “That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train. On that, in the S-3, were the Ramaiahs with their nine year-old daughter Roopa.”But then “the train stopped at a village station, as though to disrupt Roopa’s daydreams of ...

My ‘Novel’ Account of Human Possibility

Whenever I look at my body of work of ten books, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not. I was born into a land-owning family in a remote village of Andhra Pradesh in India that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from there, but much before the rural education mechanism was geared up. It was thus the circumstances of my birth enabled me to escape from the tiresome chores of the primary schooling till I had a nine-year fill of an unbridled childhood, embellished by village plays and grandma’s tales, made all the more interesting by her uncanny ability for storytelling. As my maternal grandfather’s grandfather happened to be a poet laureate at t...

BS Murthy

How did you become an author and get published? Share your experience.

It’s all there in my essay, “My ‘Novel’ Account of Human Possibility”, present in this site and in the net, that one may find interesting as well as illustrative.
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BS Murthy