![]() “If I’d been able to type faster, I might have published a novel a month." “But I type with two fingers, you know," she says, and even those two fingers are beset by carpal tunnel syndrome. Ramani Chandran, a homemaker, wrote 125 novels in 30 years. Even in the Rajesh Kumar Yugam, other authors were less staggeringly productive but did just as well. ![]() We led people to read, he preens -and he more than others, considering his staggering output. “It was us writers who made sure that there were books hanging from shop ceilings instead of shampoo sachets," he says. It is heartening that people who cannot afford a Rs15 novel are still willing to put down Rs2 to read, and Kumar takes no little pride in that fact. For those treading water financially, a teashop will even act as an informal lending library, charging Rs2 to take a book home for a day or two. His allergies have worked well for his readers, who can still amble down to the teashop or bus station every few weeks to find a new Kumar novel. Plus, I find these movie producers highly immoral people." I’m allergic to cinema, and I don’t want to move to Chennai. “But many authors have, of late, shifted to writing for films and television," Kumar says. They can include the science-fiction thrillers-more fiction than science-of Kumar, the romances of Ramani Chandran, the detective knockabouts of Pattukottai Prabhakar and Suba, the religious tales of Indira Soundara Rajan and the social dramas of Pushpa Thangadorai. The flavours of this genre are uniformly sensational but otherwise eclectic. ![]() ![]() In 1987, a novel cost Rs2 it now costs around Rs25, still a price that can call out to browsers at the corner teashop, retirees, homemakers, train passengers and other devoted readers. The classic Tamil pulp novel runs between 100 pages and 150 pages and is printed on cheap paper as a monthly magazine. In the present age, as original novels begin to dry up and authors direct their talents to the lucrative field of screenplay writing for television and cinema, Kumar is also at the head of a pack of writers that stays faithful to its lurid craft. Kumar is, one of his fellow authors says, “the superstar of the Tamil pulp fiction industry". The short story that he submitted reluctantly the next day was the first of more than 2,000 he would go on to write, in addition to more than 1,500 novels. ![]()
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