The Marigold Story: Indira Gandhi & Others
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Read between March 11 - April 11, 2022
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When people of my generation say, Mrs Gandhi, they mean Mrs Indira Gandhi;
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I belong to an era of typewriters,
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we would rely on a telegraph office or book a ‘lightning call’ and end up paying eight times more than an ordinary trunk call.
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it was imperative to carry abridged versions of a dictionary, a thesaurus and a book of idioms because both word count or spell check were unheard of those days. I
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As was and still is the norm in several Indian families, Kanwaljit’s in-laws preferred boys over girls. Therefore, when her firstborn happened to be a daughter, there were no celebrations at home.
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Thank god for a boy, otherwise, I would have had to get pregnant all over again.
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he was fiercely loyal and dedicated: qualities which were rare in politics even then, as they are even today.
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Furthermore, her ascent as prime minister had little to do with her capabilities.
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her being the daughter of an illustrious man and India’s first prime minister went in her favour and many presumed that she could be remote-controlled.
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Mrs Gandhi was anything but dumb, which many later realised to their peril.
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All this gave Indira Gandhi an image makeover: from a dumb doll, she literally metamorphosed into Durga, the eternal female power or Shakti, as deified in Indian mythology. For the masses, Indira Gandhi was the all-powerful goddess.
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What irritated her the most was a tilted picture on the wall.
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In matters of religion, Kamalapati Tripathi became Mrs Gandhi’s mentor. She did his bidding as a pupil to his teacher. Once when Tripathi told her to wash the feet of young girls and drink the water, she had stopped short, ‘What if I get sick?’ However, despite the initial hesitation, the foreign-educated and French-speaking Indira had gone through the ritual.
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To me, religion can never be above the nation: in fact nothing ever can overtake the sentiment of being an Indian.
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Lalu Yadav is of the view that power is not the birthright of a chosen few. What according to him is of utmost significance is to take destiny into your own hands and mould it to make it your own.