Thoughts of Periyar

by K. Veeramani

E.V.Ramasami respectfully addressed as Periyar (the great)
was born on 17th September, 1879 with a silver spoon to a wholesale
trader at Erode, a town in Tamil Nadu. He was a school dropout but
acquired efficiency and unalloyed wisdom. With his extra cute and
rationalist ideology he started ridiculing the ghosts, goblins and gods.
He found out that humans alone are not only responsible in creating
their our gods but also enslaving themselves to their creation. The
result superstitions, rituals, religious killings, social injustices, women
enslavement, untouchability, deprivation of education and
unemployment to the lower rungs, heinous hegemony of the Brahmins
in the Hindu caste system. As god is the root cause for these evils
‘rout god’ was his war cry. He felt that unless and until god is
abandoned, liberty, equality and fraternity will have no meaning at all.

255 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 13, 2013

About the author

K. Veeramani (கி. வீரமணி) was born in Cuddalore, South Arcot District, Tamil Nadu; his original name was Sarangapani. He had his primary education at Cuddalore and entered Annamalai University for higher education. He obtained his master's degree in economics in 1956 . He received his Bachelor of Law degree from Madras University in 1960.

K. Veeramani came into limelight when as a boy of just 10 he was allowed address the gathering in the Justice Party Salem conference in 1944. He was introduced as activist by Annadurai. Apart from one year in which he practiced as a lawyer in Cuddalore, his career has been as a social worker. He began working with Periyar in 1956, and assisted Periyar in editing Viduthalai, the rationalist daily of Dravidar Kazhagam. In 1962 he was made the Executive Editor of Viduthalai and since 1978 has been the Editor. The Managing Committee of the Dravidar Kazhagam elected K. Veeramani as General Secretary of the Dravidar Kazhagam on 17 March 1978. He was active in the social campaigns and agitations launched by Periyar for support of "socially discriminated people", and was incarcerated forty times for his activities. He was jailed under MISA for a year in 1976 for opposing the Emergency. He was again jailed in 1978 for showing Black flags against Indira Gandhi for imposing Emergency while in power.

Reviews

[Arvind · Rating 1 out of 5]

I decided to read more on EVR after hearing about the man from my friends. I started with a lot of hopes,but after reading the book, its disappointing.

First: This book is a mess. Too many spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation issues etc. For a book to betaken seriously all these should be proper. However, for every 5 pages, I could find at least 10-15 spelling mistakes and I'm not even a native speaker of English. Very shoddy editing work indeed. And this books is priced at 250 rupees. I felt lucky I got to read this from the local library for free, cause I wouldn't want to spend money on such a poorly edited book.

Second: I was perplexed at the thought process. Many of his opinions and ideas felt shallow and lacked depth. Are brahmin and shudra the only caste in TN?. Kshatriyas or Vaishays never got any mention. Author conveniently blames everything on the priestly class while all the gods being worshipped by the masses belonged to the so called shudra class. Shiva, Rama, Skanda, Krishna are being mentioned for example, but none of these are brahmins.

Overall, I didnt enjoy the read, it was a tiring experience, but it may appeal to other readers, hence for those readers, if you can forgive all those errors as mentioned in first part, go ahead.

To the publisher, pls get the wordings correct. Its a serious pain in the eye. Moreover, it makes me wonder if this is even a serious book considering the grammatical mistakes it has.

[Sri Latha]

Where can I find this book? Is there a digital version?

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

simple but complex thoughts., but intresting experience..
we can know the various facts and thoughts of life., and its purposes