One rain-drenched day in August 1950, a twenty-year-old George arrived in Bombay. He had left Mangalore just when it had appeared he was beginning to discover his moorings there. But he broke away from them abruptly and completely, carrying the essence of inheritance alone as his baggage to the new city. Mangalore’s hotel workers provided for his journey. As a formal send-off, “the hotel workers organised a meeting in Maidan and gave me R20 and a bus ticket to Kadoor, from where one took a train to Bombay”.

They advised him to study further, become a lawyer and return to serve them. But he didn’t become a lawyer, nor did he ever return. “I let them down,” he would tell Himmat one day, “not because I wanted to, but because Bombay was very cruel to me in the beginning.” As initiations are seldom not brutal, he explained, “I had no money. I wanted a job, any job, very badly. Without the job, I could neither live nor study.” These everyday torments of a recent migrant were recalled many years later when he was girding his loins ahead of his first Lok Sabha election campaign in 1967. As it was an experience in a conquered past, it is doubtful if he was not venting to make an effect; after all, Bombay was a city of migrants and he, one of their own, was now challenging SK Patil, a seemingly unshakeable fixture in its politics. That urge in him, however, could not obscure the spirited courage with which he had moved out of Mangalore. That venture conveyed a determination far more powerful than the desperation of a migrant escaping poverty. Beneath the temerity of his scheme lay hidden the implacable resoluteness of his will and a raw ardour. Far from being a hungry migrant fleeing the hinterland, he was a lad pushed out by the exuberance of a life already lived among the toiling people.