PONNAMPET (MADIKERI): He was a writer who had loved places filled with rich green backdrop and had settled down in idyllic Halligattu village, 3km from Ponnampet in Kodagu district.
Vijay Nambisan, noted poet and writer, passed away on Thursday at the age of 54. His wife Kavery Nambisan, a doctor with a yen for poetry, worked in a small-time hospital in Ammatti town near Ponnampet.
The couple could have lived in any big city but chose Kodagu for its natural and scenic beauty. Nambisan’s books are connected to places like ‘Madras Central’, which won the All India Poetry Competition, and ‘Bihar is in the Eye of the Beholder’. The articles he wrote for prominent journals and newspapers in Chennai outlined the importance of places that shaped people.
His works include English translations of two 16th century Kerala poets from Sanskrit and Malayalam.
His first collection of poems since 1992, ‘First Infinities’, was published in 2015.
“He was a rare person, he saw life in everything, chose to pen down life as he saw it connecting it to people and places and so prolifically at that. In the last four years that he was unwell, he was telling me about so many ideas playing up each aspect of his 10 years of life in Kodagu,” Dr Kavery Nambisan told Express.
“He was getting well. I had resigned from my job at Ammatti hospital sometime back to be with him, but in the last two days he did not complain about anything regarding his health. But his health deteriorated late on Wednesday night and he breathed his last. I had taken opinions from all my colleagues in the medical field but yet could not save him. He had so many years of life in him and he was just coming to primacy of his writing career,” said Dr Kavery.The last rites of Vijay Nambisan were completed in Bengaluru on Thursday.
