Makarand Paranjape writes:
...I am not sure I’ll see Raja Rao again. Rao, who turns 97 on Tuesday, is not the man he once was...
...The last time I met him, in America, he could not remember the names of his own books, among them such acclaimed works as Kanthapura (1938) and The Serpent And The Rope (1960), which brought him international renown years ago...
...After a decisive event in which, as he put it, he prostrated before Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu, weeping till the floor was bathed in his tears, Raja Rao finally turned further southwards, to the ashram of Atmananda Guru in Kerala...
...His classes were very popular. He was known to walk into the lecture theatre filled with 250 young, inquisitive minds and say, “You may ask me any question you like.”...
...Raja Rao considered his writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline. Reading him is also a sadhana. Like the great Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his fiction elevates the spirit, taking the reader to a higher plane of consciousness...
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