Word: shastri
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Fruit of Humility. Yet despite the tumult and the tremors, India continues to function with a stability rare in Asia. Part of the reason stems from India's diminutive Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, whose modest manner is the very antithesis of the hubris of Nehru. Tiny and turkey-necked, shy as a schoolboy in his rumpled dhoti and brown loafers, Shastri both matches the diminished stature of India and reflects its inchoate strength. By merely surviving for 14 months in a situation that many thought might end in anarchy, Shastri has shown that India has a chance...
Kaleidoscope of Contrast. Shastri's India is less a nation than a notion, possessed of a fragile unity that barely transcends its geographical boundaries. Into a triangular wedge of the world only a third as big as the U.S., India packs 480 million people and more than 200 million cows. From the mirage-like ice peaks of the Himalayas, down the vast and sinuous Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers (which most Indians regard as holy), through the crammed chawls and boiling bustees of Bombay and Calcutta, to the humid tip of the subcontinent at Cape Comorin, India is a kaleidoscope...
...country's major cities-Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi and Madras-has its own similarities and its own distinctions. Calcutta and Bombay are linked in their visual splendor and their vicious slums; wealth and poverty exist cool cheek by grizzled jowl. Madras, with its burgeoning Hindu evangelism (backed by Shastri's strongman, Congress Party President Kumaraswami Kamaraj), is less metropolitan but more leisurely. Where Bombay is sparked by its Parsi businessmen (descended from 8th century Persian fire worshipers), Madras is tempered by Tamil intellectualism. New Delhi-founded in 1911 by the British -is the youngest of the nation...
...Patil to the Hindu mysticism of the party's reactionary wing. But basically it retains much of the socialist stamp given it by Nehru. A small circle of Congress politicians known as "the Syndicate" currently dominates the party, and it is to this group that Lai Bahadur Shastri must remain responsible. Key members of the Syndicate...
...Kumaraswami Kamaraj Nadar, 63, barrel-chested boss of Madras, who as president of the Congress Party dreamed up the consensus scheme as a means of installing Shastri after Nehru's death. But Kamaraj speaks only Tamil, and even if Shastri were to vanish, would be content to remain only a kingmaker and cash collector for the party. Last week Kamaraj was touring his home state, preceded by an elephant with bells on its toes, to celebrate his birthday. In lieu of gifts he collected $350,000 for the party coffers...