Popular Tamil writer S Rangarajan, who wrote in his wife Sujatha’s name not only short stories and novels but also columns on various topics, died in a private hospital here after a brief illness on Wednesday night. He was 72 and is survived by his wife and two sons.

Sujatha wrote over 100 novels, 200 short stories, essays, stage plays, and popular articles on science.

A contemporary of former President A P J Abdul Kalam in Tiruchi St Joseph’s College and later in the Madras Institute of Technology( MIT) where he studied aeronautics, Sujatha joined BEL, Bangalore.

It was as a writer of class that he made his name in Tamil literary circles. He had also written stories, screenplays and dialogues for Tamil movies and was engaged in writing the script Rajnikant’s latest blockbuster Robot when the end came. He was the chief of the team that designed the EVM or the Electronic Voting Machine during his tenure in Bharat Electronics as general manager of R&D.