To the best of my knowledge, they never mentioned Ambedkar to him nor gave him any of Ambedkar's writings to read. George had two close Dalit friends from PUC onwards (1963) - Pratap and Hari, both of whom continued to be his friends and who were in contact with him till he was murdered. This was not due to his having read Ambedkar, Phule or Periyar, but arose out of his own life experiences where he witnessed the treatment meted out to my mother and our family by her husband and husband's family and relatives. His brother Cyril Reddy wrote, "George abhorred Hindutva and Brahminism. An idealist and dreamer who led a frugal, spartan life, he was a comrade in arms with a heightened sense of fellowship. To those who were associated with him in the Left student movement, he was a militant revolutionary thinker, charismatic leader, compelling conversationalist, challenging the corrupt status quo.
The harshness of their childhood and the indifference of their immediate families to their plight were to lead George to abhor the discriminations of caste, religion and gender. George and his siblings went from town to town wherever his mother and elder sister could find some work to maintain the family and educate the little children. When he finally died in 1960 when George was thirteen years old, she was not even informed of his death by his family. His father could have abandoned her, or she could have precipitated it with her stubbornness, but the fact is that Leila raised her five children on her own with no help from her husband or his family. Later, when George was barely eight years old, his parents separated. At the outset, the marriage ran into stormy weather with the families, particularly, the Reddy family. Raghunath Reddy and Leila Varghese met while they were studying post-graduation in Presidency College of Chennai. His father was from the Reddy landed gentry of Chittoor district and his mother was a Syrian Christian from Kerala, the daughter of a mother who was a headmistress of a school and a father who was a judge. George Reddy was born on January 15, 1947, in Palghat of an inter-caste, inter-religious, inter-region parentage.
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