Every time that the late M Karunanidhi went to Tiruvarur, he would apparently always ask the driver to slow down near the entrance of V S Boys Higher Secondary School. He studied at the school for three years and so he would always spend a moment or two looking at it before he went his way.
Interestingly, the former Chief Minister was almost not given an admission at the school, M Vadugananthan, the School Correspondent said. "He was denied admission and so he threatened to commit suicide. There was a small pond opposite to the school and he said if the principal did not give him admission he would jump into it. The head master didn't really notice him but after a while he called him and asked him what he had just said. When he threatened him with committing suicide again, the head master admitted him to the school," Vadugananthan explained.
Ironically, the teachers did not think much of him at first. "People did not really expect much from him so when he started to write poems and share them, he stunned everybody around him. Nobody could believe that he had such a great command over the language. He also never had any bad habits even when his friends would smoke cigarettes, he never wasted any money on it," the correspondent said. He began to get exposed to a politics, literature and ideologies of a lot of great leaders during that time as well.
Before V S Boys School, he studied at Tirukkuvalai Panchayat Union School. V Rajendran, the current headmaster of the school doesn't know of the time that the chief minster studied there. However, Kalaignar continued to have a connection with his school in Tiruvarur. The year 2016 was the last time that the CM visited his alma mater, donating Rs 25 lakh from his MLA fund towards building classrooms on campus which are now named after him.
He even spoke at the opening ceremony, the correspondent recalled," He spoke about how his career started in this school. He said that he had managed to reign (over Tamil Nadu) five times but only realised later in life and how important it was to have an education. He said that these days teachers are able to make student listen to them by just giving them a stare and that it was a good thing, as students will perform better. He said that things during his time were vastly different."
He also told the students that he saw a fire in their eyes and advised them to retain it so they would be as successful as he had managed to be. When in school, Vadugananthan said that Kalaignar had won the first prize for his speech in a competition. The topic was "Natpu" which means friendship, he did go on to make some great friendships and fought for the people he thought of as his own. It was probably the basis of his great leadership too.
