Most of us depend on the “location services” on our smartphones to find a way to our destinations, anywhere on earth or at any time around the clock.
This has been made possible through a satellite-based radio navigation system called the Global Positioning System (GPS) developed by the US Defence Department.
How many of us know that a Malayali was in the core group of experts who developed the path-breaking GPS in the 1970s that revolutionised human life worldwide? And that he is the son of a firebrand Communist and trade union leader from Kannur?
This is the story of Dr. Mohan P Ananda (78), the Los Angeles-based billionaire, innovator, entrepreneur, lawyer, venture capitalist and author who has about 15 patents in his name for various technological innovations.
His father, K. Anandan Nambiar (1918-1991) was a prominent leader of railway workers and the first Communist in India to be elected to a provincial legislature. A three-time MP from the erstwhile Madras State, Nambiar was born to K. Kammaran Nambiar, a prosperous landlord of Kadachira in Kannur. The matrilineal system prevalent at the time prevented young Anandan from inheriting his father’s wealth, which went to the latter’s sisters and their children. This made him start working early in life for a livelihood.
When he was 20, Nambiar joined the Southern Railways as a fuel clerk in Trichinappalli in 1938. While in school, Nambiar had come under the spell of a teacher. He was A. K. Gopalan, an active Congress worker before he became the legendary Communist. Nambiar, who imbibed AKG’s political beliefs, was appalled by the suffering and exploitation faced by the railway workers who were treated like slaves by the colonial masters. Nambiar soon took up his fellow workers’ cause and organised them under the South Indian Railway Union. Though he underwent extreme repression, torture and arrests, Nambiar unrelentingly led many struggles and emerged as a working-class hero.
In 1946, Nambiar was elected as a Communist Party candidate to the Madras Provincial Assembly, representing the railway constituency reserved for railway employees of Southern Railway. Soon, he resigned to work full-time as the union's general secretary. Nambiar was elected thrice to the Lok Sabha from Madras State in 1952, 62 and 67, representing Mayavaram once and Trichinappalli twice.........