His father, Villayil Raman Gopala Pillai, wrote short stories and novels in Malayalam under the pen name Njekkad, and emigrated to Singapore in 1947.
[2] Nair studied at Raffles Institution and the University of Singapore, where he earned a Master's degree in Science (marine biology) and a Diploma in fisheries (with distinction).
He later worked as an international civil servant with UNESCO, first in Karachi (1981–1985), where he began painting, and then in Paris (1985–2004), where he resided.
[citation needed] Nair began writing at an early age, with his first poems published in The Rafflesian, his school magazine, in 1963.
[citation needed] He co-translated The Poems and Lyrics of the Last Lord Lee, the Last Emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty (Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975) with Malcolm Koh Ho Ping.
I do not propose to read out his poems today, but in view of the forthcoming visit of our Foreign Minister to Peking, perhaps Mr. Speaker and hon.
Members will bear with me as I read three lines: To the east where there is sunshine The Mind must turn for the beginning of the World, in which only love matters.
Many foreigners sneer at local poetry, talking of its lack of skill (as if that is the only thing that matters) and residing in the weather-beaten towers of Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas.
"[6] Kirpal Singh reviewed Staying Close but Breaking free: Indian writers in Singapore: ".
His two collections of poetry, Once the Horsemen and other Poems (1972) and After the Hard Hours this Rain (1975), reveal fairly explicit references to Indian myths, legends, landscape and spirituality.
In an early poem 'Grandfather' written for his grandfather, Nair clearly registers the Indian nostalgia felt deeply in contemplation.
The poem is suggestive also of the position Nair himself seems to have adopted in relation to living in an environment which does not always appreciate the commitment of becoming a sensitive soul."
The basic struggle of a psyche responding to the pressures of an intense search for a personality that is rooted in the present—in one's own present—bristles in each line written by this promising poet.
For the raid into the articulate to achieve what Shelley called "new materials of knowledge" amounts to an essential self-understanding to harmonise the ways to thought and feeling.
By taking many themes as grist for his maw, Nair's poetry ranges over the feelings of a Hindu bride to the Roman Emperor, Caligula.
The simultaneous forays into life and language and the myths and legends of East and West, have strengthened and extended the coordinating power of Nair's idiom.
If we are inclined to such ungenerous thought, Chandran Nair's new volume, After the Hard Hours this Rain sets our minds at ease.