Early Life and Education
Karunakaran was born on 5 July 1918 at Chirackkal in Kannur District to Thekkedathu Ramunni Marar and Kannoth Kalyani Amma with birth star “Karthika". His father Ramunni Marar was a 'sirastadar', a government job under the then British Malabar state government. He had two elder brothers (Kunjiraman Marar and Balakrishnan Marar) and a younger brother (Damodaran Marar aka Appunni Marar). Their only sister Devaki died when she was merely 5 years old.
As a young boy, Karunakaran was passionate about swimming, football and volleyball. He also demonstrated ample interest in painting. During his early years, while being admitted to the lower primary school, he insisted not to add the caste name 'Marar' to his official name at the school unlike the normal practice of those days.
He started his school education in Vadakara LP School and continued through Andalloor and then Chirakkal Raja's School till eighth standard. Later, he had to undergo prolonged treatment due to an eye-related disorder, and was thus relocated (with his elder brother Kunjirama Marar) to the home of his uncle Puthenveettil Raghavan Nair at Vellanikkara, a village, ten kilometer away from Thrissur. The two brothers would later actively participate in the prevailing anti-British struggles since an early age. The stay at Thrissur would transform their life altogether and engulf them into the politics and trade union activism that was brewing up in the region.
After continuing the school at Sarkar High School, Thrissur (presently Govt. Model Boys High School, Thrissur), Karunakaran wanted to pursue his career in drawing and painting. He joined the Maharaja's Technical Institute (MTI), Thrissur for a Diploma in Design and Drawing. Although he earned the Diploma with a Gold Medal, except for a short stint at a Fine Arts Institute in Thrissur he did not take up painting as a profession and instead turned his attention completely towards the political issues. However, as an artist, he recalls in his biography, his paintings were appreciated well and many of them would fetch a price as good as Rs. 500 per piece.
Read more about this topic: K. Karunakaran
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:25.26.
Jesus.
“Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we’re selling this deadly stuff anyway?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)