I once chanced upon my hero, the PM. But it was two deaths that showed me the real India.
That day the two of us, just seven years old, were unhappy. The temple was not having its usual pooja and hence no prasad for us to eat. There was a heavy atmosphere. Then we heard that someone called Godse had killed Gandhiji. We were both called back inside our homes. Reaching my home, I found our front room full of people; at least thirty to forty grown-up women and men were standing listening to the radio we had placed in a bracket on the wall. In those early days, ours was one of the few homes with a radio. My parents were there but no one was serving any tea. All had tears in their eyes and there was a gloomy commentary going on. For a seven-year-old, this was a very unusual encounter with Gandhiji’s uncanny power over the ordinary people of India.
Being curious, I tried to trace where the queue led to. Hundreds of very poor but dignified people, yet again with tears in their eyes, inconsolably sad, were standing patiently. Walking along towards Tilak Bridge, I at last realised the cause for the queue of the invisible masses surfacing. It was a queue outside the house where Dr Ambedkar had been living all these years. It was a house which we passed often but never took much notice of. That day, I saw an India which I had never seen before. It was an India which we ignored passing by. They were our servants, our garbage collectors, our shame whom we hid from our eyes. They had come to bid goodbye to the one man who had given them the courage to come out and assert their place in independent India.
That was a sight that stayed in my mind forever. I had seen India at last.
Lord Meghnad Desai is a London-based economist, writer and Labour politician