Word: indira
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...Monkey Brigade. Judged by that criterion, Indira bodes well indeed for India. "My public life," she declares, "began when I was three." Her mother, a frail Kashmiri, was a Congress Party leader in Indira's native city, Allahabad. Father was heir apparent to Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the independence movement. Grandfather was a wealthy lawyer and an early member of the Congress movement. The Nehrus' mansion was a center for illegal Congress Party gatherings. Recalls Indira: "The most important meetings were on our lawn." Reprisals by India's British rulers were harsh, and often Indira watched one or both...
...years, Indira was packed off to a Swiss boarding school, but she soon returned, and at age twelve organized a neighborhood society of kids, called the Monkey Brigade, whose small members specialized in sneaking messages past British sentries, picketing stores selling foreign clothes, and freeing adult Congress members from routine jobs. A relative recalls that Indira once rushed up to some British police who were clubbing and arresting Indian demonstrators, crying, "Arrest...
...years, her main education came from the letters from her imprisoned father. Ranging over the wide scope of world history, he tried to impress upon his daughter the necessity for selflessness in the service of freedom. Today the collected letters are read in nearly every Indian school, have made Indira a heroine of the revolution to young Indians...
...Indira went to England, studied history at Oxford, joined the British Labor Party, and fell under the influence of Krishna Menon, then an agitator in the Indian League's drive for independence. Poor health and the onset of World War II forced Indira to break off her studies and return home in 1941. She plunged at once into her country's increasingly bloody battle for independence. Showing some independence of her own, she defied her father and married an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma). Within a few months Feroze and his bride were both...
...First Lady. Indira spent 13 months of imprisonment teaching illiterate Indian women how to read. Free again, she and her husband settled in Allahabad and had two boys, Rajiv and Sanjay (now 21 and 19, they are both studying engineering in Britain). The war stopped short of India's borders; Indira abided by Gandhi's slogan: "It's wrong to help the British war effort with men or money...