Unlike his comrade Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Velikkakath Sankaran Achuthanadan isn’t terribly excited about information technology—during his campaign, he targeted the state’s showpiece Smart City project calling it a cover for grabbing prime property.

Ironically, it was technology that helped him come back from the cold—into the warmth of the state’s hot seat.

From a group of software engineers in New York who set up a website on him to anonymous SMS-ers, the entire campaign to re-elect him had one defining refrain: Achuthanandan (VS) is not against development and technology. In other words, he’s not Buddhadeb’s diametrically opposite pole.

The next days, weeks, months are going to test this but in one thing, the Kerala CM isn’t so far away from the Bengal CM: his personal is fused with the political.

So if Bhattacharjee’s two-room house has become a party symbol of austerity, VS’s entire past is paraded as an allegory for his present and future. As a child who lost his mother when he was only four, his father at 11, he dropped out of school when he was in Class 7. End of education.Recalls a senior colleague at Deshabhimani, the party paper: “I once asked him why he, who loves to read so much, dropped out so early. He said he could have continued even without buying books but just didn’t have the strength to starve in school every day.”

The 12-year-old dropout then began helping his elder brother at a tiny village cloth shop. His first regular job: meshing coir to make ropes at a local factory. Since then, he has weaved a political fabric, art and craft in equal measure and today at 83, he is still doing it.

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