The birth of my political aspirations...

I was 8 years old when I started to have an interest in politics. There was a lok sabha (Parliament) election happening on that year. It was the year 1984 and it was the 8th Lok Sabha election.

The candidates from Kottayam parliament constituency were Advocate Suresh Kurup of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - CPI(M) and Skaria Thomas (I think...) of Kerala Congress.

My school did not have any student politics and because of that we didn't have any student political organizations in the school. But during student strike time, students from the nearby schools used to come to our schools and conducted strikes there.

One particular student organization caught my attention and it was the Students Federation of India (SFI), the students organization of CPI(M). The reason was whenever they come with strike, our principal would shut down the school for that day. On the contrary, Kerala Students Union (KSU), the opponents of SFI, were not that powerful in the eyes of our principal. So he rarely shut down the school when KSU conducts a strike.

This made me think that SFI is a powerful organization (it was.. and still is..) and that made SFI attractive to me.

My interest to SFI made me like Suresh Kurup. And even though my Mom was a center-right person, I became a pro-leftist. My Dad didn't align with any political parties. He has his own politics.

Suresh Kurup and his ideologies became so interesting and I began to consider myself as a socialist from then on...