‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’

‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said.

‘We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. But in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in ‘The Times’ occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

‘Except——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

The Editors’ Preface to Story of Philosophy

When Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy was published in the late spring of 1926, it was greeted with expressions of great good will for its author and with praise for its lucid style, but not, on the whole, in any fashion that betokened enormous popularity for it. The Atlantic Monthly spoke of it as an interesting and enlivening introduction to the study of philosophy, and the Bookman reported that Dr. Durant’s account of the lives of the world's great thinkers contained "a host of good tales and merry quips." But the prevailing note was on the worthy nature of the effort: people ought to benefit from the study of philosophy, Dr. Durant had made the works of philosophers intelligible to the general reader and, as the Outlook noted, the world was particularly in need of philosophy that year.

The winds of criticism blew lightly over the volume, without force enough to generate much excitement, or to propel it very far in any direction. But The Story of Philosophy began to sell at first remarkably well, and then sensationally. In a matter of months there were 17 printings, close to 30 in three years. Dr. Durant had warned his publishers that a work of this sort could not be expected to sell more than 1,100 copies; he wanted to cushion their disappointment because they were counting on a sale of 1,500. However, within four years it had sold more than 500,000 copies and ranked among the greatest bestsellers of the '205. The total sale reached nearly four million, probably a record among works of philosophy.

The story of The Story of Philosophy is a part of the distinctive character of the book, and a key to its enduring vitality. Its essential pattern was hammered out in lectures to students of philosophy who were mature, intelligent, articulate, but who were also uninformed, and in particular were unfamiliar with the great inheritance of western philosophical literature. They were workmen, and the circumstances that led Durant to be teaching them and to shape this book in the process were a long way removed from the usual academic career. He was himself born in 1885 into a working-class family of French-Canadian immigrants in North Adams, Massachusetts. As the scholar among eight children, he was trained for the priesthood almost as soon as he began to go to school. Education by the Jesuits, a subtle mind and a retiring disposition, together with a profound appreciation of the literature of philosophy, made him an almost ideal interpreter of philosophy in the traditional sense of the term.

But something happened that changed him. He describes the process in his autobiographical novel, Transition, written immediately after the success of The Story of Philosophy. The central figure of that novel is a promising, passive, learning-intoxicated scholar, as Durant was. He sacrifices his chance to study in Europe when he finds his religious faith evaporating. The deeper struggle is emotional: his break with the Catholic Church means a break with his devout, affectionate family, in a series of harrowing scenes and sad reconciliations; it means almost the end of human associations for him until new patterns of life can be woven. The world, Durant wrote, was going through changes that were not so impersonal as history presented them, for they unsettled the minds and morals of men by uprooting customs and beliefs. And the accompanying mental transition and readjustment meant spiritual suffering as well as broken families and friendships.

"Philosophy might be defined as unified knowledge unifying life,” he once told a gathering of philosophers at Harvard; "it is not philosophy if it is knowledge alone, scholastically insulated from affairs," A good part of his own break with his past was his need not to be insulated from affairs, to find himself among all sorts of conditions and men, to test his learning against the teeming, careless, everyday and unphilosophical world.

So from the quiet of the seminary he plunged into the disorder of working-class life in New York, a penniless scholar who eventually found work teaching in an experimental school run by anarchists. At 28 he married one of his students. Bride and groom enrolled in Columbia University together, living on $300 the first year. In 1917 he obtained "We began to have food with our meals." He taught in the department of philosophy at Columbia until 1921, when he organized a school for workmen. In the years that followed, the essential pattern of The Story of Philosophy was formed in lectures and discussions with students who were gifted with that deep sense of economic reality that distinguishes philosophers who are day laborers in their spare time.

The Labor Temple, in which he held his classes, was a five-story building on the corner of i4th Street and Second Avenue in New York, in a region of coffee shops, union headquarters, political organizations, and the offices of radical and revolutionary periodicals. It was a Presbyterian Church founded by a minister in 1910 in an effort to reach the industrial workers whose intellectual elements haunted that area. Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers and Leon Trotsky were among the many eloquent speakers who appeared there, along with economists, temperance reformers, socialists, single taxers, and other masters of discourse and exposition. At the Labor Temple, Durant’s Sunday evening lectures on philosophy, delivered to audiences of 500 or more each week, and his night classes for smaller groups, became a New York institution.

In 1922, during the second year of the school, publisher E. Haldeman-Julius happened to pass as Dr. Durant was beginning an evening lecture on Plato. Haldeman-Julius was the publisher of small paperbound five-cent books, called Little Blue Books, dealing with such subjects as modern thought, physiology, hygiene, atheism, glands, alcohol, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and such thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Strindberg. From his publishing office in Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius sent Durant a letter asking him to write out his lecture on Plato. Durant refused, but Haldeman-Julius then sent him a check for $150 which he could not afford to turn down, the salary of teachers in the Labor Temple School being $15 weekly. In 1922 there appeared A Guide to Plato. It sold about 100,000 copies, and was soon followed by a Durant guide to Francis Bacon, by essays on Kant, Nietzsche and Voltaire, and by similar booklets on contemporary American and European philosophers 11 works in all.

Except for his doctoral thesis, these were Dr. Durant's only published books before The Story of Philosophy began to sell by the tens of thousands of copies. This work marked a sort of continental divide in American cultural history. If a book that was devoted in a large part to such matters as Kant's conceptual knowledge or Spinoza's substances could thus reach millions of readers, then obviously there was no subject that could not be brought into the common stream of public discussion. The Story of Philosophy was not the first of the mature digests of knowledge that were then appearing: H. G. Well's Outline of History was published in 1920, and Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Story of Mankind in 1921. But it differed from these in the greater complexity of its material and in its wide range of purely literary example in its remoteness, that is, from the battles and pageants and migrations that make the story of human doings more readily understandable than an account of mankind's struggle for wisdom.

It has often been said that Durant succeeded with The Story of Philosophy because of his sense of the philosophers as human beings. John Dewey commented that he did not popularize philosophy but humanized it. The biographical details that pop up unexpectedly in this book are unforgettable, as in the description of Herbert Spencer as a bridge builder, engineer, and inventor of patent saltcellars and chairs for invalids. But the humanizing of knowledge goes deeper than its biographical freshness. The reader who discovers the book in this special edition becomes aware of qualities that were not so apparent when it first appeared. It has a personal and distinctive flavor that nevertheless combines with the rigorous discipline imposed by a textbook or a manual. It has a curious tension that underlies the exposition of the most abstruse doctrine. There is a certain arbitrariness as for example in the choice of philosophers to be emphasized which nevertheless involves no special pleading and does not sacrifice the authority of the work or separate it from the known and general pattern of history.

When he wrote The Story of Philosophy, Durant was, in short, writing a familiar sequence, but he was writing it in his own version. He was daily and hourly testing the story of philosophy against the concerns of the everyday life of that strange being whose works may be more heroic than we believe, the average man. Durant had the drive of his own lifelong love of the literature of philosophy, with its wealth of sonorous phrase and the dazzling brilliance of its generalizations, but he had something else those most academic authors in his field lack the corrective of the challenging skepticism that underlies working-class talk in the realm of ideas. Much of the lasting interest of The Story of Philosophy comes from an interplay between relaxed and leisured discourse on the one hand, and an awareness on the part of the author that he was addressing listeners to whom he must make clear its significance.

Along with these two elements is a sense of the great distance that separated the concerns of the academies from those of his audience. Running through the work like a powerful current is the determination to narrow that distance. The general is brought down to a specific example, readily understandable and yet not an oversimplification.

In The Story of Philosophy's essay on Bacon, Durant wrote: "Of theory and practice; one without the other is useless and perilous; knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges; we study psychology in order to find our way in the jungle of society.”

In his essay on Spinoza, Durant could write that Spinoza "read in Maimonides a half-favorable discussion of the doctrine of Averroe's, that immortality is impersonal; but he found in the Guide to the Perplexed more perplexities than guidance. For the great Rabbi propounded more questions than he answered; and Spinoza found the contradictions and improbabilities of the Old Testament lingering in his thought long after the solutions of Maimonides had dissolved into forgetfulness." Durant's readers did not need to know all about the teachings of Averroe's and Maimonides to understand that passage, nor did it take Spinoza's thought out of the lofty plane which Durant felt was in itself one of Spinoza's great contributions.

The Story of Philosophy was a practical work, the outgrowth of a concrete need. Durant's reaction to its tremendous popular success was thoroughly practical also. He managed to avoid the fatal venture of popular philosophers from the time of Aristotle onward namely, the desire to guide the state by influencing the ruler and, instead of becoming consultant to a political leader, bought a house on Long Island and wrote such works as Adventures in Genius and On the Meaning of Life. In 1931, after visiting Russia, he tried to counter the great Marxist propaganda campaign -to win over American intellectuals that were then beginning, writing Tragic Russia, one of his least popular works. Subsequently he settled in Los Angeles where, through more than two decades, he has been writing his monumental History of Civilization, the eighth volume of which, dealing with the Age of Reason, appeared in 1961.

The Story of Philosophy is exceptional among his own books, as it is unique among introductions to philosophy. It is easier, less formal, revealing everywhere an enjoyment and an appreciation of the subject that overrides any dutiful concern to explore all phases of it. The popular response that it evoked has one plain significance: the lessons of philosophy, tested and interpreted as Dr. Durant has done in this work, still have meaning outside the academies as well as within them, equally valid for the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the mute and the articulate, their wealth withheld from no part of mankind.

I never met him again!

It was August, and it was drizzling

We boarded the same train

In Bangalore

Running towards Hyderabad

We sat facing each other

Sitting beside open windows

It was dark, misty, and drizzling outside

We smiled at each other

I greeted him and he greeted me back

Exchanged a few custom-built pleasantries

We were strangers surrounded by the ocean of anonymity

Of a two-tier reserved train compartment

After the obligatory niceties

He opened a book and lost himself in his world

He was in his early twenties

The contours on his face kept changing

Every word he read reflected on his face

I wished to know what he was reading

Is it civil to disturb a stranger in deep meditation?

I remained silent, and my mind kept talking to me.

“You said something?” he inquired

“No, I did not! Anyway, what are you reading, my friend?”

“I know you are curious! I can read your mind.”

“Yes, I am curious! ...must be going through an interesting scene?”

“Not exactly! Going through an exotic experience! I am sorry, I did not keep your company.”

“I too love books, mostly fiction—popular pulp fiction!”

“You are a little harsh. There is no pulp fiction, only fiction!” he gently rebuked me.

“Do you read poetry?”

“I am a librarian. I read all sorts of ...whatever book that catches my attention!” he placed the book he was reading in my hands. It is the controversial book of Nabokov!

“You seem to love this book?”

“Yes.” His face was radiant.

“I read that book. I could hardly understand the second part!”
“You need not have to understand. The prose is sheer poetry. I read this book several times!” 
“Without understanding? Don’t you want to know what the author intends to tell you?”
It slowly dawned on me: He will never finish that book—his obsession!

“Very much! I am learning French and German for that purpose. I attend classes at Alliance Franchise and Max Mueller Bhavan! ”

“Strange! Did you notice that your book is broken, and several pages are missing?”

“Yes. I have to purchase a new copy!”

“No need, my friend! I have a second copy with me. Shall I mail it to your address as a gift?”

“It is very kind of you! Please send it to me, and I promise to return it to you after reading. It is a rare book to obtain these days!”

He scribbled his address on a slip and handed the slip to me.

The next morning I attended an interview in Hyderabad with the exotic feeling inhabiting me!

I was selected for the mundane activity

To be carried out with electronic circuits in the cockpit

Of a fighter aircraft manufactured in United Kingdom.

I joined him in the evening in the train heading towards Bangalore!

I kept my promise. I sent that book to him which he duly acknowledged.

We became good friends. He wrote several letters to me

Letters—real hand-written letters conspicuous by his violet coloured ink!

He sent me several books as gifts.

We changed places, and we changed our careers.

He sends emails to me now from a foreign land!

He continues to share his feelings with new books with me.

He did not return my book so far!

May be he is still reading the prose contained in that queer narrative!

Savouring every word, every phrase!

One at a time!

He may finish reading several other books—but not that book—his obsession!

He will read it again and again!

He is not a character from one of my fantasies.

He is real—His name is Satish, the librarian!

I haven’t heard of him of late!

I love to meet him again, perhaps, in a cosy restaurant.

In August, and when it is drizzling!

Mother Seshayamma…

Mother Dharanipragada Seshayamma

(1 June 1924 – 7 May 2011)

When I first met her in their home in Patel Nagar, Bapatla… Mother Seshayamma… appeared to me as a symbol of kindness and dignity …her second son Prof. Varada Raju happens to be one of my most intimate friends…and we belong to different engineering streams…used to discuss literature and music whenever we met on our Bapatla Engineering College campus…in addition to our academic trivia...

I used to call on their Patel Nagar home several times in late 1980s and early 1990s. She used to sit in the open verandah of their big home in a cane chair going through the pages of the English newspaper The Hindu—reading through her spectacles. She looked frail but sprightly at her advanced age. She smiled at me when I entered the drawing hall and asked me to be seated. She told me that my friend went out on an errand and would be back in fifteen minutes. “You may get bored, why don’t you read today’s paper”, she said and offered a portion of The Hindu to keep me occupied. I found her to be a lady of great tenacity, sharp wit, and boundless wisdom… I was in my early forties, and until then I never saw a woman of her age reading The Hindu with such keen interest.

Later when my friend Varada Raju returned home, I could not hide my curiosity. He told me that he did not attend elementary school…he received that part of his education from Mother Seshayamma herself! I asked him an awkward question! Whether she could read English? … Oh yes ...my friend told me enthusiastically… She can speak English quite well too... Mother Seshayamma never went to any school…did not have any formal education… she learned everything from her husband…among several other things…at home…

I can clearly recall another evening during Dhanurmasam…As usual I called on their home to spend time with my friend Varada Raju… He went out and would not return home that evening…I was disappointed… Mother Seshayamma could read my mind, and asked me to be seated and made me feel at home…we discussed Thiruppaavai…the ancient Tamil hymn…she spent several years in Chennai…she could understand and speak Tamil but Thiruppaavai was written in very ancient Tamil…not within her reach…I told her that I listened to some of the discourses on Thiruppaavai by Chinna Jeeyar Swamiji…our conversation was rather desultory! I recalled the way our children spent their summer vacation that year under the leadership of a senior girl-child Sundari from Chennai…She is the daughter of Prof. Varada Raju’s elder sister… a very lively girl…my younger son Sasikanth is fond of Sundari akka!...who made their summer vacation memorable to this day…I tried to talk of Sundari to Mother Seshayamma… I could not recall the girl’s name at that instant…I was in a mess…She is a nephew of my friend; I told her…Obviously my words did not make any sense to her… “She? Nephew? Did you mean the niece of Varada Raju: Sundari?” she exclaimed! Mother Seshayamma was so perspicacious…I used the wrong gender… “Yes! …the niece of Varada Raju! Is her name Sundari?”, I corrected my English.. “Yes. Her name is Sundari, you are right!” she smiled charmingly like a little child! Later we discussed all and sundry and that was the last time I saw her in her mortal frame! The stamp of Mother Seshayamma’s smile is unique! I could find it only on the face of my dear friend Varada Raju! God does not completely erase valuable things all at once from His creation!

Chelam’s foreword to Gitanjali

We know that Tagore originally wrote his Gitanjali in Bengali, and later translated it into English. We understand that the poems of original Gitanjali can be sung to folk tunes. Gitanjali seems to be popular even among illiterate people since all the poems of this masterpiece are sung throughout Bengal. It is Chelam who translated Gitanjali into Telugu in 1958. His translation is acclaimed as a classic in Telugu literature.

Chelam, quite justifiably, felt the collection of poems known as Gitanjali needed a comprehensive introduction. Chelam’s introduction to Gitanjali is a literary piece by itself. He opens his introduction with the following quote from Tagore’s Fruit Gathering.

They knew the way and went to seek you along the narrow
lane, but I wandered abroad into the night for I was ignorant.

I was not schooled enough to be afraid of you in the dark,
therefore I came upon your doorstep unaware.

The wise rebuked me and bade me be gone, for I had not come
by the lane.

I turned away in doubt, but you held me fast, and their scolding
became louder every day.

This is verse 16 in Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of poems entitled Fruit Gathering.

A State of Uplifting Bliss

I have always wanted to write. There is pleasure in writing. There is enjoyment in expressing our views in words. We all do this when we speak. I have been writing something or the other right from my early childhood. I love words and their meanings. I may not have any profound views. At times there is an absence of novelty in my thoughts. It hardly matters to me for the moment.

The very act of placing words together to express my views makes me happy. I bestow a kind of permanence to my thoughts when I write them in words. I find a special joy when I read my own thoughts. They are my thoughts. They have come out of my own thinking. They are part of me. Still, at times, they look so alien to me. When I think of something that I have written quite a long time ago, I find it as though I never wrote those thoughts. They appear so remote and alien to me. What makes them appear so remote from me? May I have to investigate into this matter? Are they not my thoughts? Am I not the creator of those views?

I am like a small child learning to walk. It takes time for me to run, to write effortlessly. There are times when I ask myself: “Why do I write?” What purpose do I want to serve by writing? I do not know any answer. Can I restrain myself from writing? Certainly I cannot. There is something within me that compels me to write. There is an irresistible urge that propels me to express myself in words. It is something innate. It is certainly an innate compulsive urge to free myself from the burden of thoughts.

Thoughts enter my consciousness without any of my efforts. Thoughts haunt me. They enter me. They urge me to translate them into words. This is something spontaneous, something that happens without any of my involvement. I am a mere spectator. Thoughts enter my mind, find their expression, and appear as clusters of words when I write.It is for this reason some thoughts appear so alien to me. It is I who give those thoughts a form in words. Did I think those thoughts? I am not certain. Perhaps I am a sort of a medium. Thoughts do not belong to me. Where do these thoughts come from? I do not know for certain. The fragments of sentences I compose with words are mine.

I am certain about one thing. I have got to write. Writing is an intrinsic part of my being. I cannot keep away from writing. We need to communicate with others for our survival. We speak mostly out of necessity. We need to talk to each other in order to get things done. We certainly use words when we speak. In one sense, the act of writing can also be used as an essential operation for worldly existence. It is a mundane crumb of the writing act.

Creative writing would never turn into a routine activity. Writing, in its true form, is not merely meant for worldly communication. Writing has a sublime role to play in the life of the writer. It helps the writer in his contemplation. One can discover oneself only when he is conscious and mindful. Writing helps to refine ones powers of concentration that lead to contemplation. Writing paves the way for self discovery.

There is magic in words and in the feat of writing. Yes, it is a feat. Man can reach his inner source through this feat. He can find his original self only through an act of writing. True writing evolves simply through an awareness of the reality of this wonderful creation. Writing is a kind of penance that takes the writer into a state of uplifting bliss.

A detailed profile of Suryaprakash Rao Mothiki

Suryaprakash Rao Mothiki is Professor and Head of the Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Chaitanya Engineering College, Visakhapatnam. He was born in 1956 in the ancient town Rajahmundry on the banks of river Godavari, and had his early education in his native town. He received his B.Tech (1978) and M.Tech (1980) in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the JNTU College of Engineering, Kakinada.. He had a rare opportunity to work under the guidance of noted scientists like Mrs. L.C.Manoharan of National Aeronautical Laboratory, Bangalore, in partial fulfilment of his M.Tech program. His Research Notes appeared in 1980 in the International Journal of Electronics published from London.The theoretical and experimental training he received from his teachers like Prof. Nallamothu Lakshmi Narayana, Prof. V. Ranga Rao, and Mrs. L.C. Manoharan developed in him a keen interest in the design of electronic circuits with discrete components as well as linear and digital ICs. He began his career as lecturer in Rastriya Vidyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore, in 1980. He joined Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Hyderabad as a Design Engineer in 1981, and worked there for one-and-half years. His love for teaching took him to Bapatla Engineering College towards the end of 1982. He has been associated with this college right from its inception and assumed positions of Assistant Professor (1985) and Professor (1992). He taught at Adam’s Engineering College, Paloncha (2000-2009), and joined Chaitanya Engineering College, Visakhapatnam in 2009.

He has authored two textbooks on Pulse and Digital Circuits and these two textbooks have been published by Tata McGraw-Hill Education in 2006. He has also revised the classic textbook Pulse, Digital and Switching Waveforms by Jacob Millman and Herbert Taub originally published in 1965 by McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. After a long gap of 42 years, Tata McGraw-Hill Education has brought out this updated second edition of Pulse, Digital and Switching Waveforms in 2007.

Suryaprakash does not really belong to the world of words by his formal education or by his present profession. He hails from Rajahmundry, and during his primary school and high school, he was exposed to some of the great works in literature by his language teachers. Some of his teachers were poets of great distinction in Telugu. Influenced by prominent literary critics like R.M.Challa of Indian Express (Vijayawada Edition) fame, Suryaprakash chose to write serious prose right from his early college days. The weekly column Let’s tune in R.M.Challa in the Indian Express has sustained his interest for decades. Suryaprakash used to contribute regularly to the Letters to the Editor columns of India Express, Deccan Herald, and The Hindu in 1980s.

Suryaprakash wrote several poems and short stories as literary exercises, and some of them were published in the Sunday editions of prominent newspapers. He has been suffering from the writer’s cramp from his college days, and he did most of his writing on his portable typewriter. He translated some of the great short stories in Telugu into English with the encouragement of some of the editors. He wrote a few film reviews and book reviews as well.He feels comfortable with philosophy, psychology and literature. While Suryaprakash cannot exhibit any academic credentials in literature, his vast reading kept him in good stead on this count. Being a reader of literature of several genres, he is well disposed to spend his spare time for the pursuit of his literary ambitions. He intends to translate a well-known Telugu classic novel Chivaraku Migileydi by Butchi Babu into English as one of his present projects.

Suryaprakash Rao Mothiki has been elected as a Senior Member of IEEE in January 2009. He has been a member of the Board of Studies, Acharya Nagarjuna University, for more than a decade. He has served the UPSC as an Advisor in Electronics. He is a life member of the Indian Society for Technical Education, Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, and Fellow of Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. Prof. Prakash Rao has taught several subjects in Electronics and Communications Engineering in his teaching career spreading over more than two decades.

Suryaprakash loves the sun and sea of the beautiful piece of earth Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, India. He lives in Visakhapatnam with his wife Saraswathi and his sons—Vamsi Krishna and Sasikanth.