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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When people of my generation say, Mrs Gandhi, they mean Mrs Indira Gandhi;
I belong to an era of typewriters,
we would rely on a telegraph office or book a ‘lightning call’ and end up paying eight times more than an ordinary trunk call.
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
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.
Thank god for a boy, otherwise, I would have had to get pregnant all over again.
he was fiercely loyal and dedicated: qualities which were rare in politics even then, as they are even today.
Furthermore, her ascent as prime minister had little to do with her capabilities.
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.
Mrs Gandhi was anything but dumb, which many later realised to their peril.
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.
What irritated her the most was a tilted picture on the wall.
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.
To me, religion can never be above the nation: in fact nothing ever can overtake the sentiment of being an Indian.
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.