Bengaluru man takes Thirukkural to global audience

CHENNAI: Hailing from the Tamil-speaking community of Bengaluru, Lucas S is an ardent admirer of Thiruvalluvar and the values he imparts through Thirukkural. “During my school days, I learned Kannada, Hindi, and English as part of the curriculum. Although Tamil is spoken at home, I could not read or write. It was during my MBA days that I initiated reading Tamil news dailies to improve my language skills,” shares Lucas, who supported his family by working in bakeries during his childhood.

Through the newspaper, Lucas was introduced to Kannadasan’s Arthamulla Hindu Matham. He was intrigued by the author using examples from Thirukkural. “I became curious about Thirukkural and Thiruvalluvar and began researching them. I was impressed and fascinated with the unique structure of the text,” says the 34-year-old. He was inspired by the ethics and secular concept of Thirukkural.

Lucas was exposed to an expository article in a magazine that explains about a person, who spent more than two decades counting the verses, chapters, books and even letters in the Bible. This motivated Lucas to do something similar with Thirukkural. He did extensive research about the age-old book. “I decided to find the shortest and longest couplet by counting the number of letters in a Thirukkural. I spent four to five months to calculate all the 1330 couplets,” Lucas states. Through his research, he found out that couplets 957 and 1246 are the longest ones with 39 letters. The shortest ones are 833 and 1304 with 23 letters. Among the 133 chapters, the fifth chapter is the longest with 339 letters and the shortest chapter is 124 with 280 letters.

Lucas’s book collection has more than 500 Thirukkural books comprising rare collections including Arabic, Spanish, English, Sanskrit, Chinese and Brahmi translations. “Being a Google user, I have observed Google Doodles featuring philosophers like Confucius, Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and many more in the past. This resonated deeply with me. However, I wonder why Thiruvalluvar has not been similarly honoured. It is my passion for Thirukkural that pushed me to embark on this unique journey to publish a doodle for Thiruvalluvar in Google,” explains the Thirukkural activist.

He approached the Doodle team to know the procedure for publishing the same and they asked him to come up with a unique doodle. “My artistic baking experience helped me in creating a sugar art doodle last year. It was a six-foot cake. To bring in the essence of Thirukkural and Thiruvalluvar, I decided to use the major concepts. In the letter ‘o’, I represented the concept of wealth by presenting the rare Thiruvalluvar coin collection of mine. It is a collection comprising of lesser-known commemorative coins of Thiruvalluvar released by the Reserve Bank of India,” says Lucas.

For the letter ‘l’, he chose minimalistic art with a Thiruvalluvar silhouette. To represent ‘Virtue’ in one ‘o’, he used right ticks to indicate the do’s and don’ts. Suggesting the chapter love, the second ‘g’ is decorated with hearts. The doodle suggestion has been sent to the doodle team and illustrators for consideration.

From his research, Lucas came to know that lips will not touch while spelling out 27 Thirukkurals, which is yet to be documented. Lucas tries to take Thirukkural to more people through his routine activities like using couplets on the invitation for family and social gatherings.

“I aim to spread awareness of Thirukkural and its values to the global audience,” Lucas wishes. Apart from Thiruvalluvar, he also wants a doodle for Bharathiyar for his contribution to the world of literature and India’s freedom struggle.