Number-crunching his day job, poetry the passion

He has 29 years of experience working in Karnataka’s state transport corporations. B Chinnaswamy may be the chief accounts officer and financial advisor for the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), but his passion lies far away from daily number-crunching.

He has published six volumes of poetry, four short stories and scripted three plays since 1989, among various other literary works, under the pen name of Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy. Through his work, this 56-year-old from Chamarajnagar has been fighting against discrimination on the basis of caste.

With an outstanding education — MCom, MA (Kannada Literature) and DLit — Chinnaswamy says his works’ roots lie in the society he grew up in. “I come from a place and time where social stratification was acute and it disturbed me as I too hail from a Dalit family. As I looked for a way to express myself, I came across a number of local poetry in newspapers. They were ‘protest poetry’, and I was able to connect with the poems’ content,” he said.

Although he began writing at a young age, and even published his first volume in 1989, Chinnaswamy says he was not confident to discuss other works or speak about the literature of the time because he had a non-academic background. “Although I knew that my works had good content, I was not very confident about discussing literature. It is only after my degree that I felt confident enough to do so,” he said.

Publishing his first collection of poems, Kondigalu Mattu Mullubeligalu (1989), gave him confidence, thanks to the critical acclaim it received.

Eleven of his poems are prescribed in school and college textbooks. The poem, ‘If I were a tree’, is part of the BA (Literature) curriculum.

Chinnaswamy is also the first poet to have his works translated and published in Spanish by Prof Rowena Hill. Select poems were published in a Spanish literary magazine from Columbia Arquitrave in 2003 and by the cultural department of the Venezuelan government under the World Poetry series, in 2004. Chinnaswamy has also participated in the Sha’ar International Poetry Festival at Tel Aviv in 2007.

Despite his works being translated into various regional languages, Spanish and English, he does not aspire to be famous.

“I wanted to do my part through something I believe in,” he said, adding: “It is important not to forget your roots, where you come from, no matter how much you grow or succeed.”