Books for Millions-Quotable Quotes from Indira Gandhi

Amita Malik, who has been writing on culture, the arts and the media for many years, hardly needs an introduction to Indian readers. She prides herself on being the daughter of a professor and a highly liberated mother and the fact that she was born and brought up in Assam, where she had a wonderful childhood. and She is a gold medallist twice over in English from Calcutta University.

Columnist, broadcaster and telecaster, her comments are read every week by millions of readers who look forward avidly to them.

Widely travelled, there are few countries in the world she has not visited, although she says her most exciting trip was to the Arctic, to spend Christmas with the Eskimoes.

Although she does not like being typed as a film critic, there are few festivals she has not attended, frequently serving on their critics' juries. But above all, she loves people and interviewing is one of her most admired fields of writing. She has also specialized in making a study of the Indian image abroad.

Indira Gandhi was, by any count, a remarkable woman. and very much a woman of our times. What is not al ways appreciated is that she was also a highly complex woman. Best known as a tough politician who could even stand up to the super powers, there was the other side of her: Derived from Santiniketan and Tagore, from Ma hatma Gandhi, from Swiss finishing school as well as a simple school in Pune. Not to speak of the entire school of life into which she was initiated by a very liberal father, Jawaharlal Nehru. There was a soft as well as a witty side to her, a woman who loved books, music, art and could hold her own in the most sophisticated company. And whose femininity and elegance charmed the world.

As a non-political writer, I met her very rarely and then only to discuss subjects like culture and the arts, or the media. Subjects on which I induced her to speak when I got the first exclusive interview with her, for All India Radio, the first time she became Prime Minister. is pre cisely because of this, I think, that I was able to see the second Indira Gandhi more clearly.

The books from which I was asked to choose these quotes being official publications, naturally have an abundance of observations on heavy developmental sub jects. But I was able to discover, tucked away here and there, the second Indira Gandhi. The one who said to me when I interviewed her immediately after Lal Bahadur Shastri so wisely made her Minister for Information and Broadcasting: "I am still too numb, after my father's death." The Indira Gandhi who made young Rajiv and Sanjay sit with her as she sympathetically watched in her garden a documentary made by an unknown young boy from Assam. The Indira Gandhi who enchanted a team of freedom fighters who had acted in the Battle of Algiers by speaking to them in fluent French and then quoting to them what they had said on Doordarshan the evening before.

The Indira Gandhi I saw for the last time, standing frail and alone, at a dinner for Zubin Mehta just a few days before her death. It was difficult to extract this gentler and more re laxed personality from such heavy tomes. But if even a fraction of this elusive Indira Gandhi comes through, I shall feel some small measure of pride.

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