From his boyhood days he was deeply interested & involved in animals, especially dogs which included the strays he befriended now & then, and trees & plants! Be was a born animal lover thanks to his animal loving father, Antony.K.Vadukut, who always supported him whenever he wanted to take some strays home to nurture!
Antony. K. Vadukut was working with Standard
Batteries at the last part of the sixties & the early part of seventies,
after brief stints with Bombay Railway Police & C.I.D.
He was very active with the labour union activities and he had a healthy
rivalry with George Fernandes, who later became a Union Minister in the Central
Ministry in the 1990s. He was a man of humble living who never stepped back
when the situation needed him to take the initiative for those who were down
trodden & needy. He was well accepted in the company he worked in.
Just after the mid seventies Antony.K.Vadukut
resigned his job in Standard Batteries & went abroad to Sharja, UAE &
joined a company, Techon International. When he went to
Sharja, seeking greener pastures, his family returned to their native state,
Kerala & settled down there. Hence, Johnson’s school education was
partly done in Bombay, Maharashtra & in Trichur, Kerala. In Bombay, he
stood first or second in his class, most of the times; he had a stiff
competition from one Susamma Sudhakaran in his Bombay School Days.
He was very much interested in sports,
all his school days; he competed in 100 meters from his KG
days in Bombay till he finished matriculation, in Kerala. He was a boy of
many talents who successfully participated in100, 200, 400, 800 & 1500
metre races, Football, Basketball, Shuttle Badminton, Chess etc. Though he
never played tennis he was an ardent fan of Bjorn Borg, the Swedish
Tennis Legend, & the game; he gathered all the info about Borg &
the game from the news papers he read ardently. It is his strong ‘involvement’
with long haired Jesus Christ & Bjorn Borg that, years later, led him to
start growing his hair from 1985! He also competed successfully in Light
Music, Mono Act, Mimicry, Katha Prasamgam, Plays etc.
From his childhood days he was much interested in
reading, thanks to his mother Rita who always supported him that he bought
large number of books, comics etc! And, on the way, some fine day, he
started to scribble small poems & stories, as well, of which some fetched
him some first & second prizes from various children’s magazines of that
time! When he wrote he wrote in 3 languages, i.e. Hindi, Malayalam &
English!
He read books as varied as Homer &
Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes & Tom Sawyer, Tarzan & Dracula. For some
time, he even dreamed of becoming a detective as Holmes was & solve the
confusing problems of the world! By the time he
finished his matriculation he had finished the entire Sherlock Holmes
Collection & finished reading at the least 30+ world classics!
In his childhood days, he was a pious child who
always considered Jesus Christ as his close friend; he took this idea of
considering Jesus as a close friend from Sister Aneisia, who told
him that ‘Jesus is a friend who can do a lot of things for him’! He
talked to Jesus as he talked to his other friends! Along the way, he
bought some sundry magic books from some temple & church festivals which he
read with keen interest & even thought of doing all the magic tricks - most
of them used ‘Special Mantras’ to propitiate some obscure gods!- in them
to the wholesome amazement of the onlookers!
When he finished his matriculation his
life turned into a totally different direction! He started to ‘THINK’ about a
lot of things which he got from reading a large number of books, including the
world classics. He had read the Old Testament, New
Testament, Ramayana, Panchatantra, Aesop Stories etc by this time. He started
to think about something so striking as ‘Kooduvittu Koodu Maral’ or ‘Sending
One’s Soul Away From One’s Body’ etc which made him start meditation, in
which he tried to ‘SEND’ his soul out of his body, as had been stated to be done
by someone, in the various stories he read! He usually sat in ‘PADMASANA’ &
tried hard doing it! Day by day he got himself deep into the path of deep
meditation which must have ‘Started’ a new beginning in his life, from where we
see a totally changed Johnson who started to deviate from the path he had been
following all his life!
TO BE CONTINUED..................!
