Personal Life
The son of a school headmaster in Kerala, Menon worked as a railway stoker, coal miner and Bangalore tobacco company clerk before gaining a junior post in the Indian Civil Service. By working assiduously, Menon rose through the ranks to become the highest serving Indian officer in British India. In 1946, he was appointed Political Reforms Commissioner to the British Viceroy.
In Patrick French's book, India - a portrait, it is mentioned that VP Menon moved in with his Keralite friends after his wife left him and returned to south India. The couple had actually arranged his marriage and helped raise his two sons. When the husband died, Menon married his widow.
Menon was given the title of Rao Bahadur, appointed a CIE in the 1941 Birthday Honours and a CSI in the 1946 Birthday Honours.
Read more about this topic: V. P. Menon
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)