Tirukural is a Touchstone of righteous behaviour, it never made a man Righteous. I’ve heard many quoting Kural as the proof of something they have observed, but never quoted as a dictum they followed – come what may.

The eagerness to compare the pithiness of the couplets to those of the sayings of De La Rochefoucauld could be tempting, yet, the comparison is not apt as the range of the Kural is phenomenally wider than that of the maxims of Duc de La Rochefoucauld and less sarcastically insightful.

I would also hate to equate the Kural with the Beatitudes for the same reason.

There is an entire part devoted to the carnality of love between a man and a woman, which is unaddressed in the Beatitudes – the purpose being entirely different.

Some of the Beatitudes are epigrammatically formulising and some are didactic, but they don’t deal with the sensitivity of human feelings – legitimate or otherwise; The Kural is magnificent in its scope and precise to the point of focus.

To slot it would be very difficult. The translations of Rajaji or Sundaram are all partially interpretative. The proof is that one has to go to the உரை or the commentary in prose in Thamizh by Karunanidhi and others, where the meaning of a particular Kural has been found to have been interpreted according to the known ideology of the interpreter.

One of the earliest translators of the Kural into English language was Joseph Beschi, whom I suppose was a missionary. He never published the part relating to Love, the third part, which he thought might not be appropriate to the Christian teachings he was probably propagating- this is assuming that he even translated the third part. It took a person by name GU Pope to translate the whole Kural into English.

There have been votaries of all religions who have read their proclivities into those couplets, yet none has made it his dictum in life to live by any of the Kurals. However any reader would wonder how a single person, by name Valluvar, could have had not only had the grasp in such a spectrum of wide ranging topics, but his poetic succinctness in expression.

I want to find a single man who says he has followed the statements- because they are NOT prescriptions- found in the Kural.