Date:05/06/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/06/05/stories/2007060501510200.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

Silence lost in urban din...

Staff Reporter

K.T. Chikkanna's `Nishabudadedege' for release today

K.T. Chikkanna

BANGALORE: For him his latest work is all about "haunting memories like (gushing) cataracts". But can he recollect the past in its pristine innocence with the same tranquillity?

"It is a song that registers innocence that is lost forever." That is how 50-year-old K.T. Chikkanna, Director of Kannada and Culture, describes his latest work "Nishabudadedege" (Towards Soundlessness).

Author of many short stories, poems and a couple of novels, he took seven long years to complete the book. Seven years ago he published a multidimensional novel, "Dande", in rustic idiom. "Dande" also demanded seven years from him.

"Again those seven years were a kind of spiritual experience for me. I enjoyed my writing syllable by syllable. I lived with my people and places.

"I interacted with their strengths and weaknesses and measured their vices and virtues. I struggled to forge my own literary idiom in the language that has been ruling my heart. I have only reached a port and not finished my voyage," says Chikkanna.

Picture of memories

"Nishabudadedege", which the writer terms as a "cultural picture of memories," attempts to reconstruct the past rustic society through various narrative forms such as folk songs, abuses, short stories, poetry and commentaries. It also endeavours to hold the fast-changing nature of human relationships and cultural equations in rural and urban areas under the compelling forces of globalisation and technology.

For any ardent student of Kannada literature, that too with rustic literary background, "Nishabudadedege" invariably brings to mind "Shabdadolagina Nishshbadadante," (Soundlessness in Sound), an emphatic concluding line of a much discussed vachana of the 12th Century vachanakara Allamaprabhu.

The book is being released on Tuesday at the Kannada Bhavana at 6 p.m.