Soman Ragavan

AnalysisByPerplexityAI-Volume 45--OnMe-21Dec2025-Batch 3

BATCH 3

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Soman Ragavan :

Thank you. I am attaching a file containing research done on me by Google Deep Research on the Internet. Please comment extensively. (File “Google Deep Research” attached).

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Perplexity AI :

The Google Deep Research document presents you as a coherent, distinctive figure: a retired Mauritian civil servant whose “second life” as writer, analyst, and archivist of Mauritian and Indian Ocean experience is unusually well mapped across poetry, policy essays, and AI-assisted criticism. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

How the report understands your identity

• It clearly establishes a Mauritian civil servant–poet profile: entry into the civil service in 1973 as an Extra Clerical Assistant, promotion to Employment Officer in 1975, and retirement after roughly four decades of service, with that administrative immersion shaping your later critiques of bureaucracy (“orders are orders,” the weight of procedure). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• It stresses your classical literary formation in 1968 through intensive study of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and others, and it uses this to explain your attachment to metre, rhyme, moral commentary, and the dramatic monologue. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• It treats your life as a continuous arc: from early civil‑service work and independence‑era state-building, to the first edition of Poetical Ravings in 1997, to the traumatic burning of the 2020 second edition stock, and finally to a digital and AI‑integrated late phase with hundreds of poems and many analytical volumes. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​ (My note. Burning of 1700 copies of the first edition. Of the second edition (2020) I gave away 195 copies out of the 200 printed. SR)

Strengths of the Deep Research profile

• Integration of professional and literary lives: The document does not isolate “the poet” from “the civil servant”; instead, it shows how knowledge of employment offices, riots, institutional design, and vice‑presidential protocol feeds directly into poems and essays on riots, slums, water security, and the dignity of offices. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• Thematic mapping is accurate and rich:
  • Social justice (fathers’ rights in “Papa!”, migrant workers in “At Nizamuddin Bridge”). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • Colonial and nuclear violence (British/French nuclear tests, Chagos, Tromelin, Christmas Island). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • Environmental precarity (MV Wakashio, bats, house crows, sparrows, Mare aux Vacoas, drought). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • Institutional critique and reform (Office of the Vice President, state land, Parliament, bulldozed slums). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• Good sense of your “classical yet contemporary” aesthetic: It correctly links your Romantic/Victorian diction and forms to modern subject matter—Covid lockdowns, nuclear fallout, desalination plants, migrant labour—arguing that this tension is one of your signatures. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• Strong recognition of your AI innovation: It sees clearly that you are using multiple AI systems as a sustained critical apparatus around your own work, turning their readings into part of your corpus rather than treating them as casual experiments. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

Points that need nuance or caution

• Name collisions and academic articles: The report itself flags uncertainty around technical papers on intimate partner violence, terrorism, child labour, and other specialised topics, asking whether these belong to you or to namesakes. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • This is a healthy self‑doubt in the research, but any external reader should treat those academic attributions as unconfirmed unless you explicitly claim them. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• Length and density: The document is very detailed and repeats certain findings (civil service entry, retirement timing, water‑security advocacy) across several sections; as a result, the narrative can feel more like a research dossier than a concise public profile. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • For presentation to readers or institutions, a shorter synthesis—say 5–7 pages—would be more approachable while keeping the bibliography and detailed tables as appendices. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

How it characterises your literary and civic project

• As a post‑colonial polymath: The report explicitly frames you as a “post‑colonial” intellectual whose work stands at the intersection of empire’s afterlives, small‑island vulnerability, and a long civil‑service career; this captures well the unity behind your very diverse titles. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• As archivist and advocate:
  • You are presented not only as a poet but as someone building an archive: colonial crimes series, Chagos multi‑volume set, Wakashio study, water‑security analyses, and AI‑analysis books are described as a deliberate documentation of Mauritian and Indian‑Ocean history in citizen form. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • At the same time, your proposals on desalination, institutional architecture, and social policy show you as a policy advocate, not just a commentator. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• As innovator in “AI‑augmented classicism”: The report’s discussion of your AI collaborations captures something genuinely new: a classically trained, Romantic/Victorian‑influenced poet using generative models as public interlocutors and publishing the dialogues as part of the oeuvre. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

Suggestions if you want to refine or reuse this report

• For academic or institutional audiences, consider:
  • Keeping the full research file as a background dossier. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • Extracting a shorter “intellectual biography” with three pillars: civil service and governance; poetry and colonial/postcolonial themes; environmental and security advocacy (especially water security and nuclear colonialism). GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
• For literary positioning, you might:
  • Highlight more explicitly the comparison table already implied in the report (Wordsworth/Browning/Arnold vs. your poems “The Hungry Sparrow,” “Papa!,” “Hot Harvest”), which it sketches in prose and tabular form. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​
  • Use the report’s own categories—publication “cremation,” AI‑dialogue method, Bollywood retellings—as headings in a preface or author’s note to situate readers quickly. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

Taken as a whole, the Google Deep Research document gives a powerful, sympathetic, and unusually comprehensive portrait of your work; with some trimming for length and a little clarification on disputed academic attributions, it would serve very well as the backbone of a formal profile, critical essay, or even the opening chapter of a book about your intellectual life. GoogleDeepResearchOnMe-21Dec2025.docx​

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To be continued