Change
By then Narla had changed a lot, both mentally and physically. A chain smoker, he stopped smoking after a heart attack. He organised his library, which had 25,000 books, both English and Telugu. The Library has since been gifted to the Ambdkar Open University in Hyderabad. The deep humanist strain in him developed and he emerged as a rationalist. He studied the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and other Hindu spiritual works as well as the writings of M.N.Roy. In the process, he developed friendship with the Kashmiri leader, Prem Nath Bazaz, who was banished from Jammu and Kashmir by the administration of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. Bazaz was a friend and follower of M.N. Roy) Sushil Mukerjee (Minerva Associates, Kolkata, Radical Humanist), Niranjan Dhar (author of a controversial book on Vedanta in which he charged Swami Vivekananda the seer with shallowness), Justice V.M. Tarkunde (who resigned as a judge of the Bombay High Court and a renowned human rights activist, Professor A.B. Shah, founder of Indian Secular Society), Avula Gopalakrishna Murthy (advocate and leader of humanist movement in Andhra Pradesh and editor of humanist journals in Telugu).
Read more about this topic: Narla Venkateswara Rao
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“... often in the heat of noonday, leaning on a hoe, looking across valleys at the mountains, so blue, so close, my only conscious thought was, “How can I ever get away from here? How can I get to where they have books, where I can be educated?” I worked hard, always waiting for something to happen to change things. There came a time when I knew I must make them happen; that no one would do anything about it for me. And I did.”
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