ARUN KUMAR has relished traversing many worlds. He and his wife, Poornima, now live in Mumbai, where he serves as Chairman and CEO of KPMG, India. They continue to maintain a home in the San Francisco Bay Area where they raised their two sons and lived for over three decades. They then moved to Washington, D. C. where he served in a senior position in President Obama’s administration. Mantram Beach is his second book of poetry; the first was Plain Truths . He co-edited Kerala’s Economy: Crouching Tiger, Sacred Cows. Arun received a master’s degree from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Kerala. He started his career in India as a member of TAS, the central management cadre of the Tata Group. He credits his interest in poetry to his father, the late B. Madhavan Nair, and the late Mr W. J. McMahon, his English teacher at Lawrence School, Lovedale.
In this book, Arun Kumar offers a seer’s moving testament of hope in a time of precarious relationships, political upheaval, and Environmental degradation. In the title poem, ‘mainstream beach’, the rhythm of the ocean salves the suffering mind; in ‘the family’, like refugees from the storm, we enter a serene Sanctuary; in ‘shwedagon Pagoda’, a timeless tranquillity permeates every aspect of the place that is being portrayed; in ‘Remembering’, the time lines and tumultuous of our world give way to a simpler time, a simple peace; in ‘gudalur, Nilgiris’, as the sun rises, the Dew dries out, and the bougainvilleas light up in lilac and red. Elegant, luminous, stark, mantram beach is a superb collection of poems by a poet at the peak of his powers.
