திருப்பூர் 100
From Indian express : Subrabharathi Manian s ‘
The Wasteland’ Turns 100 Today
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A heap of broken images, where
the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no
shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of
water.
T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land
In the afternoon of the last day
of Coimbatore Book Fair, writer Subrabharathi Manian was sitting alone at a
lawn along the path to the exhibition hall. An author of a number of books and
recipient of several awards, he drew a book from his jolna bag and presented
this correspondent. The front jacket of the book depicted the image of a dark
man in his white vest, illustrated by the city-based eminent artist Jeeva. On
it, the title read ‘Tirupur -100’
“You know the knit city Tirupur
has turned one hundred years today. However, these days, few people are
interested to look back its development as a dollar city at the cost of its
environment” Subrabharathi Manian worried.
An author of over 55 books in
the genres of short stories, novels, poetry, travelogue and nonfiction, the
Tirupur-based writer bagged the Tamil Nadu government’s best book award for his
novel Saaya Thirai (Coloured Curtain) in 1998, which spoke on the unmindful
devastation of Tirupur’s environment
caused by the dying factories of the city.
His recent book ‘Tirupur -100’
does not celebrate Tirupur’s development as a dollar city, which earns a
foreign exchange to the tune of Rs.30, 000 crore and provides job opportunities
to a plenty of migrant labourers from different parts of India. Rather, the
chapters in the book concentrate on how the city got its economic ‘developments’ at the cost of its
environment with a number of dying
factories discharging their effluents into river Noyyal.
“The book ‘Tirupur -100’ is a
precursor for the one hundred year history of the knit-city. The once
fast-flowing river Noyyal is now lying dead as a pool of sewage across Tirupur.
With its ‘progress’, the city witnesses the thronging of migrant labourers from
various parts of country. Therefore, the price of real estate plots in the
wasteland has gone up beyond imagination” writes K.Subbarayan, State
secretariat member of Communist Party of India and former MP in his foreword to
the book.
“The TASMAC outlets in Tirupur
provide an annual revenue of Rs. 1100 crore to the government. The city
provides a statistics of people consuming liquor for 3 crore everyday. On
festival days, it doubles the above figure. It’s all due to the stressful life
condition of the workers in the knit-city” worries Subrabharathi Manian
Interestingly, the writer says
that Tirupur was visited by Mahatma Gandhi for a number of times. Also, there
are many social welfare organizations functioning in the name of the father of
the nation.
“Still, the state-run TASMAC
outlets have hampered access to the Gandhian path of non-alcoholism” says
Subrabharathi Manian.
B. Meenakshi Sundaram
