- Lived:
- unknown — tradition places him in Mylapore (now a neighbourhood of Chennai) with a wife named Vāsuki; the Thirukkuṟaḷ is dated by most modern scholars to about 450–500 CE, by others as late as 650, by tradition as early as 300 BCE — and by a government calendar, officially, to 31 BCE
- Field:
- poetry and ethics — author of the Thirukkuṟaḷ, 1,330 two-line verses on virtue, statecraft and love
- The Big Idea:
- A complete guide to being human can be written without naming a god, a caste or a scripture — and if you compress each teaching into two perfect lines, every kind of person will carry it, and every kind of person will claim it.
- In their words:
- "All men that live are one in circumstance of birth; diversities of works give each his special worth." (Kuṟaḷ 972, G. U. Pope's 1886 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- Fifteen centuries of Jains, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, atheists and governments have all insisted the author of the Thirukkuṟaḷ was one of their own — because he wrote 1,330 couplets on how to live and never once told anyone which side he was on.