A S Ponnanna has argued against speakers and swamijis. At home, he loses every argument

Ask A.S. Ponnanna why he went through five schools between Virajpet and Bengaluru, and he does not blame the syllabus. "You cannot run away from teachers," he says. "They are all the same."

The moving was politics. His father, the late A.K. Subbaiah, became leader of the opposition, which came with government quarters; two years later the post went, and so did the house. A visiting grandfather noticed the boys' English slipping and switched their school on the spot.

Then the Emergency took his father for 19 months. Ponnanna was three. His mother put five sons on a bus with home-packed food and went looking for him in Bellary, only to learn he had been moved to Gulbarga. A sitting legislator's salary was stopped. Subbaiah came home with two new skills: yoga, which he practised until he could no longer sit, and table tennis, which he taught his sons. The corner of the house that held that table is now Ponnanna's law office.

He wears the Kodava Kuppya Chale to weddings and to Talakaveri, and he wants you to know it is engineering, not costume: kuppaya means a shield from the heat, the sash frees you to move through thorn and shrub, the Peeche Kathi was a working blade. It has since discovered velcro.

On the Cauvery, he is blunt — the legal answer exists, the political one does not, and Bengaluru drinks from a river it has no claim to be near. On Mekedatu, he is hopeful. On the 2010 disqualification of 16 MLAs, which he fought to the Supreme Court, he is disarming: in politics now, he says, he might have done the same.

After 29 years of winning arguments for a living? His wife, Kanchan, a teacher, wins all of them at home. "Because I let her win," he clarifies, unconvincingly.

Watch the full conversation on Expressions