It was just a year ago that Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan finally revealed his real birthday. Although all official records, including his election affidavit recorded his birthday as March 21, 1944, he had always maintained that this was the date given by his teachers in school records, and was wrong.
Just a day before his swearing-in as Chief Minister of Kerala in 2016, Pinarayi had revealed that his real birthday falls on May 24, 1944.
A year later, on his birthday, here are 10 lesser-known facts about him:
1. Born in a toddy tapper’s family, Pinarayi Vijayan had worked at a bakery in Karnataka and as a handloom weaver for a year when he was 16 years old.
2. He only wore white shirt to school because, he says, “there was no other colour I could have chosen in my school days in order to mask the fact that I didn’t have another shirt”
3. According to his wife Kamala, even amidst all of his political work, Pinarayi never neglected the home front. “Never ever have I asked him to get me something for the house. I did not have to,” Kamala told The Hindu in one interview. She also said that she has still preserved the very first thing Pinarayi bought for the house, a pressure cooker.
4. Pinarayi reportedly never discusses politics at home, according to his family. His conversations at home only revolve around family matters, says Kamala.
5. Pinarayi’s Communist leanings were rooted in him from very early days. During his childhood, his mother narrated to him many stories of police brutalities. Seeing his brother arrested for being a Communist and watching the hunt for Communists carried out by the police in the immediate post-independence days when the party was banned, sowed the seeds of the ideology in him.
6. Pinarayi has always had a reputation as a strong man, with Communist sympathisers calling him the strongest CM of Kerala. However, he revealed in an interview that as a child, he would sit and study in the kitchen, near his mother, because he was scared of ghosts and demons. He would also never stay alone anywhere.
7. Pinarayi had become an atheist by the time he reached high school.
8. His first political break came in 1986, when he was made the Kannur district Secretary of the CPI (M) when veteran leader MV Raghavan was expelled from the party. Vijayan played a pivotal role in stopping party workers from joining Raghavan’s new party in Kannur.
9. He was elected to the state Assembly from Koothuparamba when he was just 26 years old.
10. He is a hardcore fan of Rajinikanth.