During my first year at university, a senior student invited me to attend a meeting of a student organization. It was a meeting of a small group of students discussing communist revolutions around the world and the future of a revolution in India. It took some time for me to understand the student group was a small far-left organization that was active in the universities at that time.
Leftist ideologies always attracted me during my childhood. As children growing up in the state of Kerala in India, which commanded big support for left parties, we used to read a lot of magazines coming from the Soviet Union at that time. They painted happy lives of the people in Soviet Republics. If that was not enough, full-page advertisements with the pictures of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung used to appear in the newspapers. Naturally, I was sympathetic to the student organization with left-leaning ideologies. However, my priority was to focus on my studies and finding employment.
