He was the last in a family of six children. "My elder brother was also a civil servant", he said.
"I joined school in 1930 at the Palghat Basil Evangelical Mission School. In 1947, I finished school and wrote the end of school examination twice. Two years later, I wrote the intermediate exam at the government Victoria College twice. In both those years, the exam had to be written twice because the question papers leaked. In 1949, I passed fairly well, and I thought my marks guaranteed my passage into engineering college."
"Unfortunately, in those days, admission had to take forward and backward communities into account, and one of the ways of keeping forward communities out was to ask them to appear for an interview. At my interview, they asked me the fantastic engineering-oriented question, 'Do you know Sivaji Ganesan'? I said yes, I know. The next question was 'How many movies has Sivaji Ganesan acted in?' That question was beyond my depth, and they would not give me a seat. Therefore, I ended up studying physics in the Madras Christian College from 1949 to 1952. I passed out fairly well and my principal a Scot gentlemean asked me whether I would like to teach in the same college. First they gave me a demonstrator's job, and after that I became a lecturer."
In 1953, T.N. Seshan wrote the police service exam. Despite standing first in the competitive exam, he did not want to join the police, and wrote and cleared the Indian Administrative Service exam in 1954. "I joined the IAS in 1955, and I was allotted to the Madras cadre. After a year's training in Delhi, I came to Coimbatore for district training in 1956, and I was a civil servant for the next thirty-five years."
He was posted to Dindigul in May 1957. "Within a week of joining, I had a brush with a Minister. He asked me to do something and I refused. In the middle of nowhere, he threw me out of his car and I spent two hours under a tree until a passing jeep picked me up. In 1958, I moved to Madras to worked at the Secretariat of Rural Development. After that I was Director of Transport till 1965, when the government sent me to Madurai as Collector. Those were difficult times because the anti-Hindi riots had begun and Madurai was at the epicentre of the trouble." A few months later, the government gave him the added responsibility of looking after Sheikh Abdullah who was staying in Kodaikanal.
From 1967 to 1968, the government sent him to Harvard where he completed a degree at the Kennedy School of Public Administration. "When I landed back in 1968, the government sent me to Bombay to become the Deputy Secretary of Atomic Energy to work under Dr. Vikram Sarabhai."
After the death of Sarabhai, Indira Gandhi split the department into two - one dealing with atomic energy, and the other dealing with space. "She asked me to go with the space department in Bangalore. Worked there under Professor Satish Dhavan from 1972 to 1976, when President's Rule was imposed in Madras and I was called back."
"In 1978, I moved out of Tamil Nadu and went to ONGC as member in charge of personnel. A year or two later, I found out that I had run of work, so after I pleaded with the Prime Minister for more work, she sent me back to the Space Department where I stayed till 1985."
After Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1985, T.N. Seshan made him Secretary for Environment, Wildlife and Forests till 1988. "From 1987, I had the added responsibility of looking after the Prime Minister's security. From environment, I moved to defence, and after Rajiv Gandhi lost the election, I was made a member of the Planning Commission - a job without much work. I stayed there for over a year, and when V P Singh was replaced by Chandrasekhar, I was made Chief Election Commissioner of India till 1996 December, when I retired."
"After retirement, I returned to Madras, and I have been doing very little except teaching in some colleges and schools, giving lectures here and there."
He also narrated the well-known incident that occurred on June 2, 1962, when he was transferred six times on the same day. After a disagreement with his quasi-political boss at the Department of Rural Development, he said he would leave because he thought he was not receiving enough appreciation. The Chief Secretary, R A Gopalaswamy, was very angry, and he shifted me six times. "At eleven, I was in Finance, at eleven-thirty, I was in Small Savings, at twelve I was in Agriculture, at two, I was in Social Welfare and when I came back home, I was Director of Women's Welfare."
He said that his rigid attention to integrity is what he cherishes most in his long career. "I have never given a millimetre of yield to integrity."