The sea of people gathered along and around the 143 km stretch between Kerala's capital Thiruvananthapuram and Puthupally to pay their last respect to former Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy went through various emotions reserved for someone who was there when they needed him the most. 

Some didn’t care it was the last day for paying a bank loan to save themselves from being defaulters. Everyone was out there: people with walking-aids, the wheelchair-bound, pregnant women, nuns, children in school uniforms, office goers taking leaves, doctors and nurses lining up outside the hospitals. 

Hours of waiting could never have tested their patience. Some of the testimonies they recounted resembled those often heard in evangelical gatherings. 

They narrated countless instances about how Ommen Chandy’s helping hand was their last straw to claw back from a trying situation or saving or transforming their lives. 

Though it's often said Ommen Chandy loved crowds, the last 30 hours showed it was the crowd that loved him more. More intensely, endearingly and even reverentially. 

Kerala has no dearth of people’s politicians. Many of them are unassuming, unaffected and readily available for the people.

This swathe of the crowd seemed to have welded with Oommen Chandy in the most deeply personalized of means. 

Depending on how you measure, they all held on to something related to or relatable to one and only Oommen Chandy. 

His interventions, for them, were something very tangible or personal or emotional or memorable--- things that only Ommen Chandy could have done. It didn’t matter they themselves were not the direct beneficiary of any of it. 

But that act of help was timely and it made a huge difference to someone in their family, among friends, or in their village. That matterd more than anything else.

Oommen Chandy was an astute politician who played the game with a whatever- it- takes attitude. He is credited with many development projects. All that is there, but for the multitude of people, he was the one who was there when they needed him the most.