I see a log message like the following. Why? couldn't open pid file '/varunamed.pid': Permission denied

You are most likely running named as a non-root user and that user does not have permission to write in /var/run. The common ways of fixing this are to use the "pid-file" configuration statement in named.conf to specify an alternate location where the uid running named does have write permission. For example, you could create a /var/run/named directory owned by the named user and set pid-file to "/var/run/named/named.pid".