I believe these books will be helpful for all children abroad, just because it is difficult to read and write tamil as we would in TN, they should not have to alienate themselves from the beauty of our culture. Speaking tamil alone does not help as the prime factor can be influenced by the 'only movie' model Tamil TV channels.
Rajaji's ramayana is a good book for teen aged readers (if they choose to read it...). Mahabharata & Ponniyin selvan etc may be termed as PG 15... for young readers. Raja Rajan's amarchitra katha is a decent way to start off too. I dont think there is any ACK on Pallava dynasty or Pandiya dynasty.
Kalki's legendary appeal is reaffirmed by the 15-year-old Nirupama Raghavan's translation of Parthiban Kanavu.
A journalist, connoisseur of arts and a prolific writer, R. Krishnamuthy, better known as Kalki, is a literary doyen whose repertoire of work includes Alai Osai, Parthiban Kanavu, Ponniyin Selvan and Sivakamiyin Sabatham. A revolutionary, most notably in the realm of ideas, his novels and stories have a wealth of characters and incidents, imbued with rare humanitarian spirit. Most of us growing up in Tamil Nadu might remember our grandmothers waiting impatiently for their copy of the Ananda Vikatan magazine, which serialised many of Kalki's works, and making cuttings to bind them together. Kalki's style, the use of Tamil and characters proves that this prolific idealist was not just for our grandmother's age. Fifteen-year-old Nirupama Raghavan recently translated and abridged in English the popular novel Parthiban Kanavu.
The home-schooled Niru started learning Tamil after the family moved to Arasavanangkadu near Kumbakonam. Her parents gave up after learning the alphabets but she continued and soon began enjoying reading in Tamil and graduated to novels and poetry. Her grandmother, who had given her some books to encourage her to read further in Tamil, coaxed her into reading Parthiban Kanavu. Niru says, "Parthiban Kanavu was the one I picked up first. I was hooked somewhere in Book Two and got my imagination going. In a fit of absentmindedness, I told my mother this and was roped in kicking and screaming, as the phrase goes, into translating the book." This is not her first translation. When she was 12, her mother discovered her translating a Bharatiyar poem for a friend and so she ended up translating many others.
Fiction and more
She loves reading and is a die-hard fiction lover. Niru is also keen on non-fiction, generally science or geography. She enjoys fantasy, comedy, sci-fi and thrillers with philosophy-oriented fiction. She says, "I have many favourite authors, and 10 times as many favourite books." All-time favourite authors are Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Fritjof Capra, Richard Bach, Terry Goodkind, Ayn Rand, P. G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde and Saki while Bharatiyar, Yeats, Donne and Wordsworth top the list of preferred poets. Though quite a reader, 450 pages of small print is a daunting task for anybody especially since Parthiban Kanavu for all its appeal is certainly `thick'. It says a lot about Kalki's legendary appeal, for Niru took about 10 months to finish the whole book with an ever-helpful grandmother overseeing the Tamil and initial translation and her parents who proofread the complete script. "My only problem was in the initial stages, when I was figuring out the translation. It used to take me about two hours to translate a page. Later, it became easier to translate in my head. The correct words began placing themselves. The second-last day I worked, I translated 48 pages," says Niru.
Getting published was the next obvious step. Unlike most beginners Niru's tale of becoming a real author is not a sad tale of pink slips. In fact it all seems quite easy! When she finished, her enthusiastic parents took the book to Chennai and asked Tulika, to appraise it. The letter that said that they wanted to publish it themselves was a complete surprise! At the launch of the book she read from the third chapter The Pallava Messengers since Sandhya Rao, her editor at Tulika believed it was a very powerfully translated chapter and it set the tone for the rest of the novel.