Frequently Asked Questions

"Karky" means bitter in Russian. Dr. Madhan Karky was named after Maxim Gorky, the famous Russian writer — his father, Mr. Vairamuthu, was an ardent admirer of Gorky's work.

Yes — Dr. Madhan Karky Vairamuthu is the son of the celebrated lyricist Vairamuthu. While he shares a family in cinema, Madhan Karky has built his own distinct path as a lyricist, dialogue writer, computer scientist and language-technology researcher.

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Queensland, Brisbane (2004–2007), where his doctoral research focused on wireless sensor networks. He later served as Assistant Professor at Anna University before moving full-time into research and cinema. See the Profile page for the full academic timeline.

The Profile page has downloadable PDFs — a general career profile and a detailed academic CV with publications.

Dr. Karky sees a lyric as a building, a bridge, or a piece of software — in short, a process. Lyric Engineering is his research approach of applying scientific and mathematical principles to lyric writing. Topics under this umbrella include Lyric Mining, Lyricist Modeling, Rhyme Analysis, Pleasantness and Freshness scoring, Semantic Analysis, and Lyric Visualisation.

The first song he wrote for a film is "Irumbile" for Enthiran: The Robot. The first song that released was "Odo Odo" from Kanden Kadhalai, and the first to be recorded was "Hola Amigo" in Ilamai Idho Idho. That said — he feels every song he writes is his first song.

Yes. He co-wrote Enthiran with Director Shankar and writer Sujatha — his dialogue "Dot" was his first. He also co-wrote dialogues for Nanban, again with Shankar.

Almost anywhere — cafes, beaches, salons, peak-hour traffic. Any place with a lot of buzz around tends to work well for him.

The hero is a photographer in love, describing the pleasant confusion of a relationship through his own terminology. "Kuviyam" means focus, so "Kuviyamillaa" means out of focus. "Kaatchi paezhai" refers to a display unit (TV screen, monitor, or camera display) — representing his own world. "Kuviyamillaa" reflects his lack of clarity about the relationship.

He crossed 1,000 songs across 400+ Tamil films in 2025 — his 1,000th song was "Smoking Kills" from Parandhu Po. Browse them all on the Lyrics portal.

His debut as lyricist and dialogue writer was Enthiran (Robot) in 2010, where he also served as technical adviser. He went on to write Tamil lyrics and dialogues for Baahubali: The Beginning and The Conclusion, among hundreds of others. See the Filmography for the full list.

KaReFo is the research organisation Dr. Karky founded in 2013, where he serves as Research Head. It focuses on language computing — researching and building Tamil language tools, and publishing research in Tamil NLP, lyric analysis, and language-learning games.

Several free online tools, including Chol (a bilingual Tamil–English dictionary), PiriPori (morphological analyser and compound-word splitter), Olingoa (transliterator across Indian scripts), Paeri (Tamil name generator), Emoni (rhyme finder), Kural (a Thirukural portal), Paadal (the lyrics portal that powers this site's Lyrics section), and Aadugalam (a word-games portal). Quick links are on the homepage.

Yes — over 40 publications spanning Tamil morphological analysis, lyric mining and scoring frameworks, word-game algorithms, text-to-speech, and his earlier doctoral work on wireless sensor networks. The full list is in the downloadable Academic Profile on the Profile page.

KTA is an education venture founded by Dr. Madhan Karky together with Nandini Karky, built on 13+ years of KaReFo research. It brings systematic Tamil literacy to schools and the global diaspora through the Payil curriculum, textbooks and online courses.

Payil is KTA's structured curriculum and set of online courses for learning to read, write and converse in Tamil — designed to be "the world's easiest way to learn the world's oldest living language."

Thambaa Tamil Labs is KTA's in-school digital platform — deployed across 25+ partner schools with 7,000+ active learners, spanning six modules covering reading, writing, songs, movement and conversation.

Go to the Lyrics portal and use the search bar — you can search by song name, movie, composer or singer in Tamil or English. Each song page shows the original Tamil, a transliteration, and an English translation.

The Canvas section has been retired as part of this redesign. Its content has been folded into the Profile and Filmography pages where relevant.

Kiliki is the fictional language created by Dr. Madhan Karky for the Kalakeya tribe in Baahubali — built with its own structured grammar and vocabulary. The Kiliki site will soon be ported to karky.in/kiliki.

Email office at karky dot in, or reach out via Facebook or Twitter / X.