Word: gandhis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There's an undeniably romantic allure to the notion that India's election result marks the ordained resurrection of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. Its improbable return to power, atop a messy and probably fragile coalition of the Congress Party was led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of slain former Prime Minister Rajiv, who was son of the legendary prime minister Indira Gandhi (also assassinated), herself daughter of the country's legendary first prime minister, Jawarahalal Nehru, the father of modern India. As if to highlight the dynastic allure of her party, Sonia had her son Rahul...
...with the wishes of the "silent majority." The "true" leaders are always deemed to be those among the occupied people most willing to say the things the occupiers want to hear. Only once they're defeated can the colonial powers grant due respect to a "rabble rouser" like Mahatma Gandhi or a "terrorist" like Nelson Mandela. (Mandela has improbably been morphed into a pacifist in the American imagination; he was in fact the proud commander of a guerrilla army who got his own military training in Algeria and saw "armed struggle" as an integral component of his campaign against...
...black plastic. The women have only the faintest idea of who she is. Sonia cannot understand their dialect. And the photographers, trailing far behind, cannot hope to capture this briefest of off-guard moments. But away from the crowds and the press and the party meetings, as Sonia Gandhi stands alone in a field, hugging the poorest of India's poor, it is difficult to tell whose grin is wider...
...Gandhi family is adapting to the role played by the royal families of Europe as they, too, ceded power: bastions of tradition, patrician benefactors, guardians of a nation's soul. And of all the Gandhis, it is the reluctant leader Sonia who most personifies this. The sacrifice of leaving everything she knew?losing her brother-in-law, mother-in-law and husband, then accepting the life that killed them?has earned Sonia a respect and affection in her adopted country that resonate far beyond politics or nationality. Priyanka's Indian businessman husband Robert Vadra describes it simply as "unconditional love...
...spell under the spotlight, thanks to his new novel Burial at Sea, a fantasia on an alleged sexual escapade by Nehru. The central character, Jai Bhagwan, "is a takeoff of Nehru," says Singh. Bhagwan, like Nehru, is a Brahman from Kashmir, British-educated, brilliant, agnostic, a follower of Mohandas Gandhi, and with big dreams of modernizing his impoverished country. There's one difference: instead of going into politics, Bhagwan decides to transform India by becoming an industrialist to give his country the economy it deserves. The crux of the novel comes when the middle-aged industrialist, overworked and undersexed, meets...