Satyams Ramalinga Raju becomes a poet now

HYDERABAD: Satyam scam accused B Ramalinga Raju has turned poet. The man accused of committing the biggest fraud in India’s corporate history has written a book of poems in Telugu which show him as a reflective man contemplating existentialist questions.The book brings together 56 poems in free verse written by Raju over 30 years.Some were written when he was in his twenties and the rest during his long career as entrepreneur and corporate captain. They range over an eclectic mix of subjects philosophy, science, human frailty and nature’s ways.They lay unattended during Raju’s days as chairman of Satyam Computers until his wife Nandini collated them and published it with the title Naalo Nenu (Introspection).Nandini herself wrote an aching foreword to the book.The anthology, published by Emesco books, was released without any ceremony this month. “When we were newly married, he would show me his poems and I would argue with him why he neded to bother himself with such weighty issues,’’ she writes.“When I read them again recently, new meanings suggested themselves to me.’’ None of the poems makes an explicit mention of the present crisis in Raju’s life, now incarcerated in the Chanchalguda jail here under trial for cooking the books of Satyam to the tune of `7,000 crore. But a few of them read poignantly. In one, Raju concludes, “Conscience is the sound of a bee’s wing. It’s a sound you cannot switch off.’’Another poem considers the quality of betrayal.“What’s the gretaest betrayal of all?” it begins, and concludes, “The betrayal that beats all betrayals/is the one perpetrated by you upon yourself.” The book leaves the reader wondering why a man who wrote, “Let me live/in deed and thought/ honestly” went off the rails.