Thus instigated, when I did undertake the making of an anthology of Telugu short stories and started translating them (Classic Telugu Short Stories released recently by Penguin India, Rs 150), I realised that there have been few creative writers among the Telugus. Kannada and Oriya have benefited from A.K. Ramanujan and Jayant Mahapatra, and Urdu and Punjabi from Khushwant Singh and Subhash Chandra Narula. Secondly, translating from a vernacular like Telugu has the vexing problem of copyright permissions; all the authors of Classic Telugu Short Stories are dead; and few Telugu anthologies have acknowledged copyright debts. The process of identifying and locating the heirs of the authors and securing permissions from them took a year.