#Surdas

“The emperor who never lost a campaign wrote a poem about a girl who offered God a garland she had already worn — and within four decades of his death his city was ash and boulders, while the poem is still read. Empires burn; what an emperor writes with his own hand survives him.”

“The most powerful ruler in India ran his empire like a working professional — up before dawn to exercise, unbeaten in twenty years of war, master of a capital that a Portuguese visitor judged "as large as Rome" — and then wrote, himself, one of the finest poems in the Telugu language, with a manual of government folded inside it.”