Vellupillai Prabhakaran is known to be one of the most ruthless separatist leaders of all time. He heads the fiercely loyal outfit Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has been fighting to carve a separate Tamil nation out of the tropical Indian Ocean island nation of Sri Lanka.

Born on November 26, 1954 in the Northern coastal town of Velvettithurai on the Jaffna peninsula, Vellupillai Prabhakaran is the youngest of four children. As a student he was an average performer, very bookish and very shy. He is known to have been fascinated by Napoleon and Alexander the Great early in his childhood. He was also deeply influenced by Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, who were involved in the armed struggle for Indian Independence from Britain.

Not even 50 yet, Prabhakaran is unrivalled in his sinister influence over a nation's fate. Since 1983, he has lorded over LTTE, which has led to at least a dozen cold-blooded political assassinations, several murders, tens of suicide bombings and over 60,000 deaths.

Prabhakaran is notoriously known to wear a cyanide capsule around his neck, to be swallowed in the event of his capture, and also expects his followers to do so.

To his followers, Prabhakaran is a freedom fighter, struggling for Tamil liberation from Sinhala oppression. To his adversaries, he is a ruthless megalomaniac, with a brutal disregard for human life.

'Inside An Elusive Mind – Prabhakaran, the First Profile of the World's Most Ruthless Guerrilla Leader' is a one-of-a-kind book about one of the most wanted men in the world. Written by M R Narayan Swamy, the book is a result of over one hundred interviews in India, Sri Lanka, Europe and North America over a period of two years.

M R Narayana Swamy, who has been a journalist for 25 years has been a veteran observer of Sri Lanka since the inception of the insurgency in 1983 and has closely followed Prabhakaran's career. His first book, 'Tigers of Lanka' was widely acclaimed for the meticulous account of the separatist movement in Sri Lanka.