Karthik Navayan
(We thank Karthik for this moving tribute to the great Telugu poet, Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideologue, Dalit leader and social revolutionary K.G. Satyamurthy, who passed away on April 17, 2012-- Round Table India)

You have to decide on your own how you wish to understand Satyamurthy, but he was a man who everyone should try to understand. If efforts to understand him are marked by sincerity, poets will understand him as a Mahakavi, (radical left) revolutionaries* will understand him as a great revolutionary leader, thinkers and philosophers will understand him as a great thinker. To understand a man, it might be enough to read his writing, but to understand Satyamurthy, one needs to understand his life too.
Satyamurthy had little interest in the many comforts easily accessed by traditional upper caste, middle class revolutionary leaders and poets. It was not that he could not have earned them, but he chose to live by the ideals that informed his writing. There was no contradiction between his life and his writing. After he became a revolutionary, several decades ago, the last three years of his life were the only time he actually spent with his children, whom he had left long ago. Until 2009, he was constantly engaged in one kind of activism or another, constantly traveling, especially in Telangana where he still has a lot of admirers. There were many occasions on which he developed health related issues while traveling and had to face his daughter's anger. His life itself was poetry; it was not a poet's life. We cannot separate his life from his poetry. He lived by the politics he believed in, and lived among the poor and the people he trusted, all through his life. That is the main difference between Satyamurthy and other poets.
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