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Magazine
Slice of life
Some places are unique
BY V. GANGADHAR
Illustration: Surendra
We know there are cash-rich towns. But do you know there are places which are “people rich”? While reporting news from Gujarat, I learnt that the Kheda district was noted for its vast numbers of millionaire Patels, all landowners. Further, many of them had gone to the United States and made money over there as motel owners. People in Tamil Nadu talk of the geniuses in Mathematics who hail from Kumbakonam town and attribute it to the quality of the water in the local river. In some Punjab towns, almost every home has someone serving in the armed forces. The small, unglamorous, middle class suburb of Shivaji Park in Mumbai produced dozens of outstanding cricketers (Sunil Gavaskar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Ramakant Desai and so on) who were spotted while practising on the Shivaji Park maidan which came to be known as the Nursery of Bombay cricket. My own home town Palakkad was famous for people with different types of talents — Cooking, Civil Services, Carnatic music and journalism. There was a time in the past when the venerable news agency, Press Trust of India, was known as the Palakkad Trust of India!
Surprise contribution
But I was not prepared for the wonderful contribution to India’s progress by the small, sleepy Kerala town, Ottapalam, which was recently highlighted in a newspaper article. The place is quite close to Palakkad and while growing up I had often visited it to spend school holidays with my uncle and his family. He was a lawyer. Many of his clients were the poor local people who could not afford to pay legal fees in cash. So, they did it in kind and very often the “fees” consisted of bunches of bananas, huge jackfruits, bags of rice, dozens of ripe and unripe mangoes and so on. The town was nothing much to write about, drab and dirty like hundreds of similar towns.
But, don’t jump to conclusions and brush aside Ottapalam. The town, with a 50,000 population, appears to have had a direct link to policy making in New Delhi, considering the number of senior bureaucrats it provided, particularly in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). It is wonderful to learn that Non-alignment and other major areas of India’s foreign policy were thought out and practised by the brains of Ottapalam! Mind you, the process had been going on for several years.
The newspaper article listed an impressive array of names who brought fame and glory to Ottapalam and the nation. V.P. Menon, who helped Home Minister Sardar Patel in the integration of princely States to the Indian Union was from the town. So are M.K. Narayanan, the current National Security Adviser and K. Sankaran Nair, former RAW Chief, whose recently published memoirs, Inside IB and RAW: The Rolling Stone that Gathered Moss is full of sensational disclosures. Well, this was not really expected of Ottapalam bureaucrats who were privy to dozens of national secrets.
Long-standing tradition
The lineage of Ottapalam VVIPs goes back several decades, according to the newspaper article. Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, jurist, educationist, reformer, was a liberal and moderate president of the Indian National Congress in 1897, his nephew Sir C. Madhavan Nair was a member of the British Privy Council and the Chetturs, despite changes in spelling the name, contributed significantly to Indian bureaucracy . One of them, S.K. Chettur, was also a writer of note. On the diplomatic front, one of India’s most well-known diplomats was the foreign secretary K.P.S. Menon who was Sir C. Sankaran Nair’s son-in-law. The clan obviously took to diplomacy in great style. K.P.S. Menon (Jr.), his son, also became the foreign secretary and the present incumbent, P. Shivshankar Menon, is his nephew. It is almost like the Henry Cabot Lodge clan from Boston. There are dozens of senior and junior IAS officers who are from Ottapalam, holding important posts at the centre and several States.
Unlike the Palakkad stalwarts who were mostly Brahmins, the Ottapalam achievers were all Nairs. They belonged to the landed gentry, accumulating wealth from the lush paddy fields. More importantly, the clan invested heavily in education. The Nairs sent their sons and daughters to the best schools and colleges in the region. The next step, of course, was the civil service, ICS before independence and IAS after 1947. On the local front, the Ottapalam Nairs invested heavily in educational trusts and started high quality institutions.
Ottapalam highlights the truth that investment in education pays. In the rest of the Kerala State, people working in the Gulf sent home huge remittances which were frittered away in drink or building palatial homes with marble pillars and so on. If a part of this money had been used to provide quality education, Kerala’s progress would have been much better and its contribution to national affairs not restricted to just a few towns like Ottapalam.
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