Word: lal
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...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...
...Lal 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...
When Prime Minister Nehru broke with the conservatives in 1951, Shastri abandoned one preceptor, Tandon, to join the other, Pandit Pant, in supporting Nehru. From that moment Lal Bahadur Shastri never left Nehru's side, and the grateful Prime Minister repaid the loyalty with a succession of Cabinet jobs...
...seem provincial, since he has only once been beyond India's borders, and then only to neighboring Nepal. In a nation so divided by religion, language and regionalism, his great strength is his ability to bring people together. When a volatile language dispute broke out in Assam, Lal Bahadur quietly worked out a settlement. When the Sikhs campaigned for a separate state, Shastri was able to talk the Sikh leader out of a planned fast unto death. "I listen to different viewpoints. I have the capacity to understand them. I keep an open mind." As Home Minister, he noted...