August 3^rd in the year 1926 according to our south indian panchangam is called Akshaya Varusham, considered very prosperous. This ‘poorvangam’, i.e., introductory remarks, goes to establish the birth of this scriptwriter, emerging into this wonderful, somewhat wicked world. The ‘namakaranam’, i.e., naming ceremony, gave me the name “Sadasivan”, driven by my father’s implicit faith in Sadasiva-Brahmendral, whose arishtanam at Neroor, located near Karur, draws as a pilgrim center, large crowds all through the seasons. Sadasiv-Brihmendral happens to have been the Sankaracharya of both Sarada Peetham of Sringeri and the Kamakoti Peetham of Kancheevaram; he was a much revered avadhoota swamigal, and in Carnatic music concerts, many of his compositions find prominent place espousing the Vedanta philosophy. He was supposed to have carried out many miracles.

I was born in Mylapore, a popular section of Chennai, then known as Madras, with residence at Kaarunyeshwar Koil Street, walking distance from the famed San Thome beach, a seafront where the Basilica of St. Thomas is located. This beautiful planet of ours saw yet another addition to global citizenry.

I am now known as K S Sadasivan; the elongated name is Kadayampatti Subramanya Sadasivan, a Smartha Vadadeshathu Vadamal of Bharathwaja gothram. I am proud to associate myself with the one and only Rajaji (Sri Rajagopalachari) and Dharmapuri Subbarayar, a well known ‘vaakkaya kaara’ of famed jaavalis (Carnatic music); we all have Salem connections. 

My father, Subramaniya Iyer was in one of the earliest batches of Stanley Medical School (Rayapuram Medical School) with Dr. T S S Rajan and the likes as his classmates. Myy dad shared a room with many others on Mint Street (Thanga Salai) for a monthly rental of Rs 10/- and a paati-ammal (a grand old lady) nearby was so pleased with Rs 5/- per head per month to cater for breakfast and dinner. Can we in our next seven births even dream of living conditions so cheap that meets our basic human needs? My father took to education forsaking the comforts of rich, rural peasantry class (mirazdaars); bold and courageous he was to opt out of the comforts of his village life at Kadayampatti to reach distant Trivandrum (now Tiruvananthapuram in Kerala) in pursuit of an early scholastic career, completing his FA (Fellow of Arts, equivalent to present day Class XII), for eligibility to a college course. Those days, there were scores of philanthropists that took good care of people like my father. Temples too had community kitchens to feed the multitudes of away-from-home-humanity. The ‘oothuporais’ of Kerala rendered yeoman service in this direction with free food distribution, day in and day out. The display of such human spirit in such exemplary form is hard to find these days; those were days perhaps, where the idea of sharing played a more dominant role in community life. Religious sentiments were confined within permissible parameters and inter and intra faith sensibilities never generated vile and vulgar passions. The period covering my father’s prosecution of school and college life was during the first two decades of twentieth century. That sums up how my father availed of the scholarship offered by the Government of Burma to do medicine (Allopathy) on condition that, on completion of medical studies, he would sign a bond to serve in Burma in the Burma Medical Service. After thirty two years in the medical profession, exclusively within the boundaries of Burma (now Myanmar), and a few years on deputation to Penang (another British Colony), he retired in 1939, to settle down in his own conceived layout of a bungalow in T Nagar, which was getting developed as an upper middle-class residential complex. T Nagar was well-planned, with Panagal park as the neighborhood center, with roads and streets, shopping areas, parks, schools, health centers, and places of worship, all laid out to answer to the community’s needs. Once a large sheet of water, which in tamil is called ‘A-ree’ (lake), T Nagar today can be rightfully considered a modern neighborhood, central to all human activities of Chennai. My goody goody Madras assuming a new name and color as Chennai is quite jarring to my ears. To me, old names spell magic and grandeur; old is gold, and gold always glitters and is enduring.

Let me digress here a bit to tell you, my beloved readers, that my narration neither follows a chronological pattern nor what I write is out of my memory, which has not faded even a wee bit. Mind you, I am running eighty-six, with faculties functioning more or less normally. I would be covering a whole gamut of subjects comprehensively, including classical Indian music, which is my first love, and without ignoring the lilting light variety of music, mostly of yesteryears. On sports, I would be dealing with cricket, hockey, and basketball, where ‘Sada’, as I was known by, was a popular guy. Lawn tennis, table tennis (ping-pong is the name we used those days), athletics, billiards and snooker, the exhilarating game played on a green top table would all find place in my narration.

English literature attracted my attention from my school days, and to this ripe old age, my interest in English literature, both fiction and non-fiction has not diminished. My appreciation of English literature, not excluding the translated edition of non-English authors and writers would be widely covered as they all have left an everlasting impact in my evaluation of life and times.