Click to play videoNew Delhi: "Don't judge me by my caste, I am a scholar and a writer." This is what former Karnataka chief minister Veerappa Moily said when he was appointed chairman of the OBC quota oversight committee last year.
Moily has once again asserted his literary credentials with his fourth novel The Edge of Time, the English edition of which has just hit the stands.
The unassuming Congress leader writes about injustice and oppression, and the hunger of the poor and the backward for knowledge and a better life.
"Naturally I write about them. I am also from the same community. I have seen it all. I tend to react to what is happening around me," says Moily.
Sixty-seven-year-old Moily's political and literary pursuits began simultaneously four decades ago. He wrote a novel called Kotta when he was the chief minister.
It has been translated into several languages, including English and Hindi. Two of his novels have been turned into Kannada films.
Born into a family with very limited means, Moily rose to become Karnataka chief minister.
Through a busy career, first as advocate and then as Congress leader, he has never forsaken his passion for writing and is of the view that scholar-politicians are a vanishing tribe. "I write to keep this dying species alive. It may even inspire others to write,” he says.
Credited with major reforms during his tenure, Moily is also a poet and a Yakshagana artiste. Ramayana Mahanveshanam is an ambitious epic where he retells the Ramayana from Lakshman's point of view. He has already completed five volumes of it.
Moily has now embarked on a saga that chronicles the story of Draupadi. Here is one politician who holds writing dearer to his heart than power and believes art makes politics more human.
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