He was a professor at Harvard University and part of the revolutionary Ghadar Movement before returning to Kerala at the behest of Jayaprakash Narayan to champion Indian independence there in 1936.
A protégé of both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, he nonetheless eschewed nonviolence, as the mastermind behind and leader of the 27-man team behind the 1942 Keezhariyur bombings.
[1] After independence, he declined a position in Nehru's Indian Congress party government, instead representing Thrithala in the Madras State Legislative Assembly from 1952 to 1956, and then Vadakara as its inaugural Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha between 1957 and 1962.
After earning a graduate degree from Berkeley in 1923 for a thesis entitled The cooperative movement and economic welfare, Menon went on to receive a doctorate in economics and sociology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1932, with his dissertation entitled Postwar Progress of the Cooperative Movement in the United States and USSR: A Comparative Study.
[6] He joined Harvard as professor, where he met Jayaprakash Narayan who was sent to the US for higher studies; that friendship guided Menon into a new way.
[8] He was main man behind the famous Keezhariyur bomb conspiracy case which attracted media attention from the whole country, with Mathai Manjooran as his second-in-command.