Chennai: There is a Latin saying “Vita non est vivere sed valere vita est” which translates to “A life not lived is a life not worth living” and which he uses to describe the life of Jayalaithaa Jayaraman.
As an AIAMDK Member of Parliament he received a call from the party leader MGR to receive her and take her into Parliament House, which is what R. Ramakrishnan, did along with Mr Mohanarangam, MP. Their stints in the Rajya Sabha ran concurrently for a couple of years during which time he got to know the former cinema star well.
“The most remarkable thing was her intellect. I would go so far as to call her an intellectual. People would never understand if I tell them that she was an intellectual because her background wasn’t that of a noble,” Mr Ramakrishnan said.
“It was her ability to grasp things that stood out. Give her a subject and she would study it intently before arriving at a conclusion. As an administrator, that was her greatest strength,” he added.
Jaya was known to have to battle her party men who were jealous of her rise and ensured there would be rifts with the leader on several occasions. On one of those occasions and in pique, she handed in her resignation letter to the Rajya Sabha chairman R. Venkatraman. Being from the same state and knowing the personalities well, Mr Ramakrishnan interceded to ensure that the resignation was not accepted and that the letter was put in cold storage by the politician from Tamil Nadu who went on to serve as Vice President and then President of India.
As it transpired, Jaya made up with MGR on a visit to Chennai and soon enough the letter made a quiet disappearance thanks to Mr Venkatraman seeing the light and deciding that the lady may have acted in pique.
“She could be explosive,” Mr Ramakrishnan said in describing her vault to becoming a champion of the people and being Chief Minister six times over four terms. As he was to say at the very start, Jaya’s life was worth living because she lived it fully, whether in office or not, whether in cinema or in politics. Understanding her complexity would not come easily even to people who knew her very well. But Mr Ramakrishnan did not wish to reveal any more details about her life than to say that she lived it fully.
