The New Indian Express ·
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.
