It is my experience that interviewees are rarely interested in you. Occasionally, at the end of the meeting, they may lean back and ask a couple of cursory questions about your work. But, on a Wednesday evening at the Kerala House in Delhi, K.K. Shailaja had barely walked into the room before I was peppered with half a dozen questions. Where was I from, what did my parents do, do I have children, what is my daughter’s name. Her interest in my life was at once uplifting and endearing, and it was easy to see then how this MLA and Kerala’s former “rockstar” health minister emerged as a calm and efficient presence at a time when the world was a bewildering place stalked by an invisible killer virus. She envelops both, a comforting maternalism as well as a teacherly authority.
In her new book, My Life as a Comrade, co-written with Manju Sara Rajan, former CEO of the Kochi Biennale Foundation and journalist, Shailaja writes about the course of her life that started in a small settlement in Malabar and eventually led her to a Cabinet position in the State government. She was born in a family that was fiercely political for at least two generations prior. In the 1930s, her grand uncles were participants in the early stages of communism in Malabar, they fought for farmers’ rights, courted arrest several times and the most fierce of them, M.K. Ravunni died from injuries sustained while incarcerated. Their sister, Shailaja’s grandmother, also stepped into the agitation, helping hide party workers, and looking after the sick and the poor.
