Word: bahadur
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...during Nehru's illness told newsmen, "If the Prime Minister has something in his mind, he has not informed me of it." What, then, focused attention on Shastri? His personal honesty, for one thing, and his deftness at conciliation for another. A secret government poll revealed that Lai Bahadur, next to Nehru, was the best-liked, best-known figure in India...
...chosen last week to command one-seventh of the world's people has a turkey neck, a smudgy mustache, and an expression of ineffable meekness. It is a little misleading, insists Lal Bahadur Shastri, the new Prime Minister of India. "I am not as simple as I look...
Freely translated, Lal Bahadur Shastri means "Graduate Brave Jewel." He was born in 1904, the second son of a minor tax collector in the vil lage of Mughal Sarai, near the holy city of Benares. His father died when he was an infant. The child belonged to the Kayasth caste, who were disdained as quislings by other Hindus because they became clerks and officials under the Moslem rule of the conquering Mogul emperors. Their reputation for shrewdness is so great that an Indian saying runs, "If you meet a Kayasth and a serpent, kill the Kayasth first...
...Bahadur showed little of his caste's supposed brilliance, although he cared enough about an education to walk eight miles a day to school, sometimes taking a short cut by swimming the Ganges River, carefully strapping his books to his head before entering the water. He made his first total commitment at 16, when Mahatma Gandhi spoke to students in Benares. From Gandhi, says Shastri, "I learned of the moral aspect of life-to serve your country without love of power and authority, if possible." To fight for freedom, the lad quit high school three months before...
...former ambassador to India predicted that Lal Bahadur Shastri will be elected "within the next couple of days, and that will be that." Shastri is minister without portfolio in the cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, who died Wednesday of a heart attack...