Era. Natarajan has made Cuddalore proud as he has deservingly bagged the Bal Sahitya Akademi Award for children literature.
His work “Vignana Vikramathithyan Kathaigal” has earned him the coveted laurel which has commendably improved his stock among the contemporary littérateurs.
About the conferment of the award Mr. Natarajan told The Hindu that “it is the happiest moment in my life. It debunks the theory that the children of the modern era, who tend to get wired to the television sets, electronic gadgets and cell phones, have lost the appetite for reading good books.” Therefore, as a rightful gesture he has dedicated the award to thousands of book-loving children in Tamil Nadu.
Mr. Natarajan, who has been working as the Principal of Krishnaswamy Memorial Matriculation Higher Secondary School, for the past 15 years, has shot into fame by his magnum opus “Ayeesha,” a short novel about a precocious Class IX girl student who finds it extremely difficult to fit into the straitjacketed school syllabus.
Through such epoch-making works Mr. Natarajan has brought out the lapses and lacunae in the new education policy. It has earned him the sobriquet “Ayeesha Natarajan” and the book has come to form part of the syllabus in Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Madurai Kamaraj University and in Singapore educational institutions.
Mr. Natarajan is of the firm view that the curriculum and other reading materials should be so designed “to trigger creativity and foster fantasy among children.”
He said, “Children are living in a wonderful world of creativity and fantasy, which should not be blunted by the unimaginative school syllabus. The very first question I ask students on entering school is what kind of books they read beyond the syllabus.”
His long standing teaching experience and his triple postgraduate degrees in English literature, psychology and education management, has stood him in good stead to understand the cravings within the young minds to explore the new universe not sullied by the stale and hackneyed concepts of the adults.
Mr. Natarajan categorically said, “Children by birth and nature are free from any vices and ill will. It is only the adults who are prone to all kinds of social evils such as cheating, robbery, murder and what not. Therefore, what the children require to hone their latent talent is not just stories based on the puranas but those tempered with scientific concepts.”
It is for this reason the Akademi has chosen his book ‘Vignana Vikramathithyan Kathaigal’ for the award. The book dismisses all the averments of the Vedal that death occurs owing to one’s curse or becoming a victim of black magic.
“But Vikramathithyan, an intellectual, seeks to clear the misconceptions about death and says that it is primarily 11 causes such as cancer, polio and obesity that take a toll on humankind. It is my endeavour to bridge the chasm between myth and science, without affecting the original charm of the former,” Mr. Natarajan said.
In the Naveena Panchathanthra Kathaigal Mr. Natarajan has sought to establish a lifelike contact between a mouse that escapes the clutches of a lion and the computer mouse, as the latter is all in praise of the former’s exploits.
Mr. Natarajan further said that he had written another book “Era of Zero” in Braille which was read (or is it ‘felt’) by the total number 2,900 visually impaired students in the State.
He said that the well stacked library in his school was a source of inspiration for him to venture upon writing books.
