It was the one of the happiest accidents.I started doing Indian studies in the first semester of the first year of my college, and I gradually got into studying this subject. I was finishing my BA and I came to India for the first time and I decided to study Indian subject. I was supposed to study Sanskrit in Varanasi but that particular year, there were many students...My professor sent me to Madurai to study Tamil literature, instead.Yeah, I canYezhu varasham aa naan Tamil pesinadhu illa, so, it's a bit rustic.Innaki sapatathuku apparam, pakkathula ippudi nadanthu tu vanden. Theru la romba kootam jaasthi aayuduthu.Konjam bhayama irundhudu traffic aa pathutu. Aana ennaku namma veetuku thirumbi vanda maari oru feeling vandurchu (OMG, the accent is killing, even though the diction is perfect)... Oh my God, I was jumping over puddles and zipping through traffic... and I haven't been here for the last seven years and I had this huge smile on my face...Well, I've finished two books recently, there's another book g up about people who are not coming up about people who are not unlike myself but from the 13th century -people who are textual scholars in south India -some in Tamil, some in Sanskrit. Looking at how people dealt with a textual path, how they invented new texts in the process. How they had books manuscripts and invented new texts. Then I'm working on two longerterm works of translation -one is in Sanskrit and is the work of the Kashmiri poet Bilhana, and the other is one of the volumes of the Kamba Ramayanam...Of course, I translate things all the time, but I've never tried to do something so large. It's an interesting challenge, to try to make these works relatable to contemporary Indian or American audience. And for me, the connect is... Okay , for a moment, let's forget about Tamil, and think about Sanskrit. We think that language is an inaccessible ancient language of the temple... but there is something peculiar about Sanskrit.When we see all the Indian languages, Sanskrit words are still available to us. My theory about it is, the translator who is trying to do justice to the alamkara shastra or kavya, or say the Ramayana, should try to translate it into the elevated version of their own first language -if you try to make it alien, it will seem false and artificial. People think Sanskrit is a dead language, but it really isn't, and it still has that contemporary vibrancy to it. Take my friends who are Malayalam or Telugu speakers, for instance, for whom their everyday speech has about 70 per cent words borrowed from Sanksrit. So the words are there, they're available to their children and so the generation continues and there's a kind of naturalness to it when they try to translate. What I am saying is, I relate more to the language.Since 1996, when I came to Madurai for my studies. I've somehow tended to come here ever since. Tamil Nadu is home. I've kind of backpacked all over India more towards the east I've been to Orissa, I've spent some time in Kerala, Karnataka, but when it comes to India, I gravitate back here to Chennai and Pondicherry .I haven't been here since smartphones. I mean smart phones were here, but still not omnipresent as they are now back in 2010. And that's obviously an epochal change. The same changes are happening in England and America at the same time. But I was surprised over the last two days by how recognisable Chennai was. I thought the place would have changed massively over the last few years, but it was less changed than I thought it would be. It's still the same. I mean, travelling from the airport I when I saw the huge flyovers and all, I thought I would be driving into something like a Dubai, but that wasn't the case. It's still the city I know. Of course there's a big change in my biography from the time I first came to Madurai till now -and I haven't been to Madurai in a long time, and I imagine I'd be shocked if I go there now. The Madurai of my memories, the Madurai of the 90s, was still a place where there was very little English spoken, it was still very much a small town. Chennai, has the same kind of sense to it.Like I keep saying, well, for me, it's India. It's home, so, its familiarity. Chennai is one of the reasons that keep bringing me back to India, because I have young children, a family back in the US. And when I was walking around in the morning today , I can now see it through my kids' eyes -they haven't been to India yet. I can imagine their excitement, and also their abhorrence for the noise and the traffic.I think that Tamil is, other than, of course Hindi, which is recognised as the great Indian Language, quite well-known. Part of the reason for that is that Tamil has been part of the international language for longer than it's been in India.Tamil is spoken in south-east Asia, Tamil is spoken in Sri Lanka, Tamil is spoken in Fiji, Malaysia... Now, it's seen as a preda-natural global language -I mean it's been happening for a long time. You can go back to the 11th and 12th century , and Tamil was there and it was already this language of the Bay of Bengal. Tamil and Arabics together had this kind of mutual life, and in many ways, it was important that they did. In many ways, it is akin to the mutual life Tamil and Sanskrit would've had in India. So, while it is a regional language, there is something about the place it belongs to that defines the language. I was stepping off the plane the other day , and I was worried -I haven't spoken Tamil, except for, of course sporadically , in about seven years. But I just took a deep breath and it all kind of came back.Those that I have spent the most time studying and translating... and then there's Kamban's Ramayanam.When I agreed to translate Kamban, it was with a sense of intimidation -it is such a huge `monument' -and now, I am looking forward to getting to know Mr Kamban better in the next couple of years. I don't read contemporary works as such, but I do keep track of what's happening by talking to my friends here.The worst's got to be the time I fell ill. My then girlfriend, my wife of 20 years now, had come to visit me here -she had never left north America before, and I had already been in Madurai for a year, so, I came to Chennai to meet her and I fell sick. She ended up looking after me! And the best memory... I have lots of moments, but in the 1996 autumn, I went to Thanjavur, and I saw the Brihadeeswarar Temple for the first time. I was... well, I just walked around for some time... it was this kind of transformative moment -it was like, `My God, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life.'.Well, the Tamil cinema I know best is the cinema of the 90s -that's the time when I came here and we used to go out. So the other day , at a conference, a friend of mine was presenting a paper about the Rajini-starrer, Padaiyappa . It is my favourite Tamil movie as well. I've seen it over a dozen times, and so, he was having this very intensive academic discussion about it and we kind of broke down when we started talking about the film to his fans. That was really funNo. The only Tamil film star I've ever met is... I met Ajith once, when I was doing a tourist's tour of the studio he was shooting in, but he was just one or two films old back then -not the star he is now. And he shook hands with us, we took some photos.In part, it is contextual, because I was here when it was absolutely omnipresent, and was part of all that excitement. There is something, an unmatched quality in that film that's different from other films, I think.It's just that much more -over-the-top is the wrong word -it's just that much more kind of intense, an intensified version of all the characters Rajini played before before and after that film -throughout his career, basically .

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