R.K. Narayan, the man who brought this fantasy world to life, who inspired many endless quests to track down the town and its inhabitants, failed his English exam. He loathed physics and chemistry. Surprisingly, he cleared those two subjects, but failed in English, his favourite. Even then, he did not give up! Assuring his father that he would attempt the exam again, he spent the next year at home, reading and writing in earnest. Subsequently, he passed the exam in 1926. Few years later, unable to find a publisher for his first novel “Swami and Friends”, Narayan told his friend to throw the manuscript into the Thames river. Instead, the friend took it to Graham Greece, English novelist, who was so impressed that he recommended it to his publisher.
He has published numerous novels, five collections of short stories – A Horse and Two Goats, An Astrologer’s Day, Lawley Road, Malgudi Days, and The Grandmother’s Tale, four collections of essays – Next Sunday, Reluctant Guru, A Writer’s Nightmare, and A Story-Teller’s World, a memoir – My Days, collection of legends drawn from the Mahabharata and the Puranas titled Gods, Demons and Others, two travel books – My Dateless Diary and The Emerald Route (about Mysore state which had sketches by his younger brother, R K Laxman, the famous cartoonist).
Swami and Friends and Malgudi Days were made into a highly successful television series in the eighties by the late Kannada film-maker Shankar Nag. Another of Narayan’s popular novel, The Guide, was made into a successful Hindi film by Dev Anand’s Navketan Films in 1962.
Picture Credit : Google