was equally fashionable to renounce it, sheepishly and quietly, once you grew older. 

For Chatterjee, son of N C Chatterjee, a Hindu Maha Sabha stalwart, shunning his father's rightwing ideology in favour of trade union work and Marxism was a great leap. Another leap was from courtroom to parliament, while remaining on the periphery of the powerful CPI (M) Politbureau.

The Left support to the Manmohan Singh Government catapulted him to the Speaker's chair - the first communist to hold that post. His regular runins with the opposition NDA that never quite relished this elevation from ideological standpoint are as controversial as his clashes with his own Marxist colleagues who, when ordered by the party commissars, harassed and humiliated him. Both are now part of the contemporary history.

But Somnath Da may have the last laugh. He is furiously working on his book, dictating it at full-speed, where he can be expected to call a spade a spade.
That is how a soldier fires away his gun when the war gets over.