This youngster knows Tirukkural inside out

Madurai:The couplets of Tirukkural highlight the spirit that preaches positive love and forgiveness besides leading a humane life.It has a message for all – children, parents and kings.But what about the Tamil letters used? Scholars themselves would not have as extensively researched the usage of vowels and consonants in the work as M. Vadivelan has done, one might wonder.

A standard VIII student of Royal Vidyalaya Matriculation School, Madurai, Vadivelan knows that Tiruvalluvar has used 40,900 words (excluding headings) throughout the book. Of these, 3,074 letters are ‘uyir ezhuthukkal,’ 12,729 ‘mei ezhuthukkal’ and 25,047 ‘uyir-mei ezhuthukkal’ and the lone ‘ayutha ezhuthu’ in 50 places.“Tiruvalluvar has not used the letter ‘ow,’ but has used the ‘aa and iv’ combination,” Vadivelan says. Tirukkural has three 23-lettered couplets, ten 24-lettered couplets and so on. The list ends with one 39-lettered couplet, which also takes the pride of being the longest couplet of the work.

Vadivelan can also say how many times each letter appears in every chapter.What motivated him? His determination to be different and the help extended by his teachers. Since the standard III, he was searching for a platform to exhibit his unique talent. One day, Manimaran, Vadivelan’s father, asked if he had completed studying Tirukkural. To escape his father’s wrath, Vadivelan asked him if he knew anything about the number of letters used in Tirukkural.“That casual conversation gave me the idea to work on the Tirukkural project for about one and a half years,” Vadivelan says.

Vadivelan wrote 1,330 couplets on a 91-feet-long paper and presented it along with his research work to the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam as Tamil New Year greetings. What is he doing now? Studying couplets and their meaning. “So far, I have completed 1,000 couplets,” he says. What does he want to become in life? “The Collector of Madurai.”