Ramesh Chandra Tiwari is presently working for Life Insurance Corporation of India. He was promoted to Assistant Administrative Officer in 2009 but he downshifted the same year because of his passion for creative writing. He graduated in Hindi, English and Economics from Avadh University, Faizabad in 1984 but he completed a master’s degree in English Literature after twenty years from the same university in 2004. His return to education after a long gap awakened a new love for learning in him. He studied English grammar and then got into the habit of reading different literature books, which later inspired him to write prose, poetry and fiction. He has written 18 short stories, 25 short shorts, 5 nonfictions and a number of poems, in the years since.
The Teacher of Kabir’, one of his essays appeared in ‘Reading Hour’ Bangalore and two of them, ‘On Being Distinguished and ‘A No-Party Democracy’ in The Galaxy. His poems ‘The Human Population’ and ‘Florian’ is published in the Criterion. The criterion has also published his six short stories: A Wad of Notes, Possessiveness Brings Life; the Excesses, an End, Our Inspirations are the Will of God, You dilly-dally?, The Poverty Trap, God is Even-handed. Five of his short stories: The Bus Ticket, The Girl, The Hermit and His Disciples, Hari-Ki-Pauri have appeared in Galaxy. LANLIT published his Walls of Hesitation and The Bombay Review Pseudo-Ostentation.
On May 1, 1964, Ramesh Chandra Tiwari was born into a humble family that lives in a backward village of India named Umari Dahelo and depends on farming. During that time, his family barely made ends meet with what his father Prahlad Kumar Tiwari earned, so when he grew up to be a boy, he had to work on the farm, which gave him little chance of receiving proper schooling. However, he managed somehow to complete his primary and junior education in government schools in the nearby villages. In 1978 he was sent to Bahraich to continue his studies but his father could not afford to pay his school and boarding fees for long and asked him to come back home. Ramesh had a passion for studies so he chose to balance it with and to scrape a living from, part-time tutoring.
Ramesh went to Raipur, now the capital city of Chattisgarh, in 1984 with the aim of finding a job, and there he got a temporary job in a corporate office. Now for the first time in his life, he felt in command of his life. In 1987, he chanced to meet a group of poets who invited him to become a member of Hindi Sahitya Mandal, Raipur. It was here that he developed an interest in literature and composed a number of verses in Hindi. Varshagaman Geet, Basant Shubhagaman Geet, Sacha beer, Conference, Ek ho Jayen agar, Jaroorat hai ek neta ki and many other poems appeared in Newspapers and magazines. Akasvani Raipur also broadcasted a few of his poems. He participated in a lot many Public Poetry readings and was often greeted with cheers by a wide audience. He was elected Secretary of the Sahitya Mandal in 1988, but he could not continue in this position for long because he took up permanent employment with Life Insurance Corporation in 1989 and his first posting was in Dalli Rajhara.
In 1990 when he visited his home to Umari Dahelo, he found that the situation had worsened: his old mud house had collapsed; his father was heavily in debt and his fields lay unploughed and unsown. The plight of his family shook up his emotions and soon after he was back at work, he applied for a transfer to the corporation’s Bahraich Branch. A few months later, his transfer request was granted. Back in his hometown in Sept 1991, he turned his attention to his family and worked day and night to repay the loans which his father had borrowed from the banks and to get his family back on track. Finally, he succeeded in not only re-establishing his family business but also in developing it, but this led him to a catastrophe as his father, with a view to taking control of the business again, started to get in the way of his work. His brothers too tended to want to become his obstacles. Since he knew that the financial condition would revert to previous state and all his efforts would be in vain if he withdrew from the business activities, it came as a shock to him and induced a stroke that completely paralyzed his right side in 1997.
The long illness tore his life apart. He took out heavy loan against his salary to meet his medical expenses and the total amount of deductions exceeded 75 percent of salary. He recovered from the illness in 2000 but was forced to live a hand-to- mouth existence again. Anyway, he left his village in 2001 and settled at Bahraich with his wife Shiv kumari and two daughters Neelu and Princy in order to escape tension. It was still not the end of the problems. Now he noticed that the tranquilizer he had been taking had caused him to lose all his knowledge. He was lying in his bed one night thinking about what he should do. Suddenly it occurred to him that he should return to education to do an MA in English. He received official permission and applied for admission as a private candidate the following session 2002-2003.
