A K Vijaykumar

The author, Les Tarron, pen name for Dr AK Vijaykumar, is a retired mathematics teacher. He claims he enjoys retired mathematics and occasionally indulges in it these days, in the seventy fifth year of his sojourn in this mudball.  As for his reading tastes, he was and is an eclectic and compulsive reader of everything from Spiderman to Sartre - with a decided penchant for the Spiderman end of the literary spectrum. His preferred reading is Victorian literature though, with P.G.Wodehouse, G.K.Chesterton, Conan Doyle and Kipling among his favourites.. As for writing from the other side of the Atlantic, the Pancharatnas of American humour - S.J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Ring Lardner, James Thurber and the inimitable Mark Twain - rank high with him. Americans have a crop of wonderful humorists, he opines. He's made some forays into science fiction, his favourite in this genre are the books by Arthur Clarke. In fact, that's what set him off on his sci-fi writing, when to his own surprise, he turned out three books and a clutch of short stories. His tastes have become narrower these days (he calls it more 'focused') and is mostly confined to popular science. He sometimes - but only sometimes - regrets he has not spent his time more profitably in reading more 'serious' stuff. He's also a crossword junkie and gets his daily fix from his morning crossword in the paper. And there's cricket, of course. Ten boys playing cricket with a tennis ball is enough to make him pause for a few minutes in his morning walks, he says. Throw in the odd film, preferably Westerns or old Hollywood musicals, a bit of music from everywhere - Hollywood,  film music mostly of the Indian variety, a dash of  Western and Indian classical music - and you have the man.