your bridge home
Festivals
A poet with no rank and no royal patron once had to prove his book was true, and the proof came down to whether a wooden plank would sink.
A poet once had to prove his book was true. Not clever. Not clean. True. This is the story Tamil tradition tells about how that proof happened.
The man at the centre of it is called Thiruvalluvar. "Thiru" is a mark of respect. "Valluvar" was his name. Tradition places his home in Mylapore, a coastal town that today sits inside the city of Chennai. Later poets could not agree on every fact of his life. Some placed his birth in Madurai instead. Some gave him different parents. What they agreed on was his work: a book of 1,330 short couplets called the Thirukkural.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.