In our part of the world there is this story of an old lady. She used to take us across the green lakes in her small boat. When the dark clouds set in and we panicked mid-way, she showed us the light and a little blue sky. She showed us the way and gave us poetry to sing on the way. Then one fateful monsoon night when the darkness kept creeping in from the west and the waters were rough, she went alone, alone into the lake, in her small boat. No one has seen her since then.
Courtesy : Malayala Manorama
Professor M N Vijayan died yesterday, and a lot of us wonder what to do with the cloudy sky. We will miss the old man who reminded us “that drinking cola is drinking cola’s politics; that a watchman does not become irrelevant even if robberies don’t happen; that we respect the dead because they stop competing with us”. The writer, thinker, teacher will continue to live on through his language and the slogans he raised on our soil against imperialism and invasion. M N Vijayan will live through us.
6 responses so far ↓
1 clash // Oct 4, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Written very very well…… I again say : well said mate!
2 jiby // Oct 5, 2007 at 3:39 am
i didnt care about this man before…but nowadays i look back, i think he might be right in a lot of things he said. some political ideology is changing in me…not sure what though!
chanced upon this blog…interesting stuff…thought u wud like to read it… http://keralamnow.blogspot.com
3 bvn // Oct 5, 2007 at 6:16 am
clash, thanks pal
Jiby, same here…i started reading him perhaps a year or two before. I admire his clarity of thought. Nice to know we have had people like him. btw saw the blog..i would stick on to just interesting
4 Madan // Oct 17, 2007 at 9:24 am
It was in 1998 that i first met him at the Calicut University and heard his speach. Before that I had read his first book named “Kavithayum Manassasthravum” (Poetry & Psychology) based on the works of noted malayalam poet Vyloppilly Sreedhara Menon. After that it became my pleasure & craze to hear him and read his works. Now I am in a real pensive mood, unable to realise the reality of the great death!
5 Sudarsan // Jul 15, 2008 at 3:37 am
Vijayan, a Marxist thinker and literary critic, had greatly influenced contemporary Kerala culture as a radical thinker in fact a radical humanist of M N Roy’s genre
6 Sudarsan // Jul 15, 2008 at 3:39 am
He was among the rare breed of teachers who refused to give the students straight answers. He disturbed them with his doomsday prophecies and inspired them, like Socrates, with his original observations..It is truly an unimaginable losse to every intellectual Malayali…
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