My father took me to Sector 19, off Madhya Marg, as our first Prime Minister was visiting Chandigarh, a city still in its adolescence, if not infancy. I was hardly three years old. As the pilot car passed by, the crowd got excited and started chanting and shouting slogans. My father lifted me on his shoulders so that I could have a clear view. I could see him in a slow-moving open car standing and waving to the crowds. The handle bar in his car was full of marigold garlands which he was throwing gradually one after another towards the crowd gathered along the Marg.
When he died, I was in the fourth standard. His Will’s copy printed on both sides of paper in Hindi and English was distributed to every child in the class. Later on, our school master, Moola Ram, delivered a sort of lecture on that Will. The way he described in his exposition Pandit Nehru’s love and attachment to the Ganga and his love for his countrymen brought me close to tears twice.
Since then, I have tried to read every article or write-up on him that I could lay my hands on. He was a voracious reader at least till Independence and was himself an author of some eminently readable books. Discovery of India was on of the most well known. Shyam Benegal turned this book into a sensitively beautiful serial by the name Bharat ek Khoj for Doordarshan.
I never could read any of his books except his Autobiography, which I purchased in a used books market in Sector 15 seven or eight years ago in a paperback edition. I found this book to be remarkably perceptive, though it tells mainly about the author’s role in the freedom struggle for the period till 1936. For example, speaking of animals as symbols of ambition or character of various countries, he sums up: “Nor is it surprising that the Hindu should be mild and non-violent, for his patron animal is the cow.” The book was written in various jails in which he was confined from time to time by the British.
Some 12 years ago, while still in service, I attended a seminar about up-rating of the Bhakra hydro station under the auspices of the Central Board of Irrigation and Power. An engineer from the BBMB summed up his lecture with Nehru’s words: “These are the temples of modern India.” A lump came into my throat for my entire career was spent in the hydro energy sector .
Nehru was a self-proclaimed agnostic who was secular to the bone and above communal prejudice. He led the newly independent nation in the right direction for almost 17 years, notwithstanding a few glaring mistakes.
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