President's 103rd birthday goes unnoticed in Kerala

IT turns out that the 103rd birth anniversary of K.R. Narayanan, the country’s first Dalit president and the first individual from Kerala to hold the top office in the country, for some reason passed off without any significant happenings.

Incidentally, a note to this surfaced in the media circles on Saturday mentioning, ‘a birthday that Kerala forgot’, report online news sites quoting IANS.

According to records, Narayanan was born in Kottayam district on October 27, 1920 and died on November 9, 2005 in Delhi.

Narayanan, after his post-graduation, reached Delhi in 1944 and worked as a journalist and once interviewed Mahatma Gandhi.

Later, he got a Tata Fellowship and reached the London School of Economics and became friends with legendary Indian economist K.N. Raj, former PM of Canada Pierre Trudeau and first president of Mauritius Veerasamy Ringadoo.

In 1949, he joined the Indian Foreign Service and held important assignments and on being asked by Indira Gandhi, he entered politics and won three Lok Sabha polls from the reserved Ottappalam Lok Sabha constituency in Palakkad district (1984 to 1992).

In 1992, he was elected as the Vice-President and five years later became the country’s first Dalit president.