Ruskin Bond & Sudha Murthy: Studies in Simplicity

One of my greater pleasures in life has been reading two Indian authors--- Sudha Murthy and Ruskin Bond. One is the wife of a man who helped script India's success story in the Software industry –Infosys Chief Mentor Mr N R Narayana Murthy. Sudha Murthy has done her duty in life as a wife, mother and is now using literature as an avenue for self expression as well as a means for funding her larger calling in life --Charity. The other Ruskin Bond is a professional writer who chose the path of literature over that of a cushy job and remained single so that he could devote himself to his call in life-writing. Ruskin Bond is a man who still in some ways lives or at any rate writes in a time warp. While he has retreated to the hills in Mussoorie, the settings of most of his stories are Dehradun, more specifically the Dehradun of his boyhood.

Sudha Murthy's stories are spread across the country and while she often likes to delve into the past and recount even old stories, this lady's stories are as contemporary as they get. The two writers’ despite the difference in their background and the settings of their stories have one thing in common--simplicity. Reading both of them is to see writing reduced to its simplest form. Not for them the bombast of words but the simplicty of an idea. Indeed this is the common strain that binds the two authors together. Whether Sudha Murthy is writing about how she taught her grandmother to read or the ungratefulness of a man who refuses to acknowledge those who helped him in his past--her stories manage to reduce the human situation to a level of simplicity which few authors before her have managed. Her stories in English (which is all that I can read due to my own linguistic limitations) may not please the lover of literature but the reader can relate to what she is writing. All of us have seen children taking up the phone and blocking it through incessant use even as their parents watched helplessly. Haven’t we all at sometime not encountered a chattering relative and a poor people who are honest to the core?

Ruskin Bond on the other hand can elevate the art of simple writing to a literary form. While he chose not to study in England and opt out of the usual routine of studying in a Victorian setting his writings are unmistakably literary. The settings of his stories are maybe Dehradun but the contribution to literature is unmistakable. In many way Bond alongwith R K Narayan can be considered as a pioneer in Indian writing in English. Long before it became fashionable or profitable.

Next time you have time on your hands and you are wondering as to what to do not reach out for the television set but pick up a collection of stories by Ruskin Bond or Sudha Murthy. If not anything else, you would have had a glimpse of that long forgotten art--simplicity.