Raja Ganesan's View Of Politics

I was born and raised in my native village, where I lived for thirteen years as a young boy with very little understanding of the world. According to our family tradition, all important matters were supposed to be overseen by my maternal uncle. But I never had one. Even today, people in our village still talk about how a man named Sakthivel Asari, who lived next door, once picked me up, put a drop of local liquor (saarayam) into my mouth, and made me bathe in it as part of a folk belief. If people in government positions make mistakes, they are transferred. My hometown was such a place—a dry, barren land with no water. The primary school built by Kamaraj for classes one to five is now closed. I realized this only when I went there to take a photograph. It was then that I learned the school’s teacher, Arogyaswamy, was a Christian by name. His own village school was six kilometers away. Today, there is a tar road connecting the villages, laid by my father, but back then there was not...