Sreenivasan, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Singapore, 1962-63) and a nurse, Baratham decided to follow his parents and entered the medical profession.
In 1974 he was able to get his first short story, "Island", published in Commentary, the publication of the National University of Singapore Society.
The novel was loosely based on Operation Spectrum, the case of the so-called Marxist conspiracy, a group of Catholic activists whom the Singapore government had declared to be Communists and subsequently arrested.
The same year he also published an erotic love-story called Sayang set in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
[3][4][5] In 2015, The Straits Times Akshita Nanda selected A Candle or the Sun as one of 10 classic Singapore novels.