Showing posts with label Biographies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biographies. Show all posts

26 June 2012

Biography of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit


Biography of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit the first female President of United Nations General Assembly : Breaking Knowledge

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was the first female President of United Nations General Assembly. She was an Indian diplomat and politician. Moreover to her credit, she was the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. She was India`s first woman Cabinet Minister and the first woman to lead a delegation to U.N. She was the world`s first woman ambassador who served three prized ambassadorial posts at Moscow, Washington and London. She considered Indian National Congress as her own family as she was born into it. According to her, politics is a means of social and economic reform, which strengthens human rights and empowers women. She was against monopoly of power by one family.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was born on 18 August 1900 at Allahabad. She was the daughter of Motilal Nehru and Swarup Rani Nehru. Her father had great admiration for the west and took the best he knew from it. According to him, “Western” meant discipline, rationality, a sense of adventure and a practical approach to problems. He was a rebel who was against caste barriers and outdated customs. He was not at all worried to throw away anything that he did not consider wise. He did not fear criticisms. He even sent his son, Jawaharlal Nehru to Cambridge to study. Her mother`s life revolved around her family and her religious observances. She did not speak English but she fulfilled her duties and accompanied her husband to English homes. Her own home was the centre of the contrasts present in the country. In her home, tradition and modernity co-existed harmoniously.
In her autobiography, The Scope of Happiness, Vijayalakshmi describes her childhood as a period of contradictions and contrasts and as a period of transition from age-old traditions and prejudices to new ways of living and thinking. Motilal`s powerful molding influence was greatest on Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who, of his three children, resembled him in her temperament, her zest for life and her involvement with other human beings. At a very early age Vijayalakshmi was very much interested in politics. At sixteen she attended her first political meeting, organized by her cousin Rameshwari Nehru at Manyo Hall of Allahabad University to assemble women in a protest against the treatment of Indian labourers in South Africa. At sixteen, she wished to join Annie Besant`s Home Rule League but being too young, she was allowed to enroll only as a volunteer. She was married to Ranjit Pandit, who was a cultured litterateur, aristocrat, and barrister from Kathiawar. They married on May 10, 1921, when she was about 21 years old. Three children were born to her- Chandra Lekha, Nayantara and Rita Vitasta
In her mid thirties she was elected to the Allahabad Municipal Board. She was arrested and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for presiding over a crowded public meeting where the Independence pledge was taken. This was the first of her three imprisonments. When the Indian National Congress took part in provincial elections she and her husband, Ranjit S. Pandit, were elected to the U.P. Assembly. Vijayalakshmi was appointed as the Minister for Health and Local Self-Government.
For two continuous years she was the President of the All-India Women`s Conference. Tragedy struck her with the death of her husband after his last imprisonment in 1944. As he had left no will, she was left virtually penniless, as Hindu widows had no inheritance rights. His brother claimed all his investments and earning and made everything in his custody. Shaken by her grief and without knowledge of future and with no source of support from her brother, as he was imprisoned she left for Bengal to work, where cholera had spread in the wake of famine, and to set up a Save the Children Fund. During this time, Gandhiji was released from jail and he asked her to go to America to speak about actual conditions in India. This became possible when Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru(President of the Indian Council for World Affairs) included her in an Indian delegation to the Pacific Relations Conference to be held in Virginia.
She became the member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution. After Independence she was twice elected to Parliament and she led India`s first Goodwill Mission to China and served as Governor of Maharashtra. She resigned her post to stand for election to Parliament from the constituency of Phulpur that was vacated as a result of Jawaharlal Nehru`s death. Four years later, she resigned from the Lok Sabha as it was difficult for her to serve her party under Indira Gandhi. During the Emergency, she stepped out of retirement to speak out against dictatorship and dynasty. She could not find a place in the power structure under Indira Gandhi.
She collected more than eight honorary degrees from the world universities besides those offered to her in India. She celebrated her ninetieth birthday by inviting her family members, (who were at the time both in government and in the opposition) to lunch in Dehra Dun. All members came regardless of political difference. It was a grand function and it happened to be her farewell as she died two months later. It was Rajiv Gandhi, who personally supervised her last rites. Vijayalakshmi used to say that none should mourn her death as she had lived long. Her family members took her word to heart and at Sangam instead of mourning her death they celebrated her life. Her life was actually an example, which all humanity could follow. She had great will power; she was courageous in her agonizing situations and led her life triumphantly. Till the end she was fully involved in her life. This great personality breathed her last on 1 December 1990 at Dehradun.


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Biography of Jawaharlal Nehru

Biography of Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru : Breaking Knowledge

Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of Motilal Nehru was born in Allahabad on Nov 14, 1889. He was the first Prime Minister of Independent India. He grew up in an influential political family, his father being a lawyer and prominent in the Nationalist Movement.
His Childhood was privilege; he was tutored at home and then studied in England at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was admitted to English Bar and returned to India very westernized. He married Kamala Kaul in year 1916. And in 1917 their only child Indira was born.
Nehru met Mahatma Gandhi in 1916 at an INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS party meeting. From then on, their lives were entwined, though they differed on several points, Largely because of Nehru’s international outlook clashed with Gandhi’s simple Indian outlooks and views. The turning point in his life came in 1919 when he overheard General Dyer gloating over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. From this point he vowed to fight the British. Regardless of the criticism, he was one of the most influential leaders in freedom struggle. He was the pioneering articulators of Asian resurgence and an unusually idealistic advocate of consciences in International politics.
The younger Nehru became a leader of more radical wing of the congress party and in 1929 he was elected as the party president. British repeatedly arrested him for civil disobedience strikes and other political actions; he spent half of his next 18 years in jail.
During his life time, he went through the variety of individual and collective reactions- to be adored as a revolutionary and vibrant personification of the forward looking spirit of India, to be described as a pampered young man who unintentionally acquired the national leadership due to influence of his father and the nepotism of Mahatma Gandhi.
He is admired as the leader of freedom movement, as the father of institutional democracy and as an architect of Indian policy in all manifestations, and as the longest serving Prime Minister of India (1946-1964).
After World War II he participated in the negotiations that eventually created the separate states of India and Pakistan, a partition of Indian subcontinent between Hindus and Muslims that Gandhi refused to accept. When independence came on Aug. 15, 1947, Nehru became Prime Minister of India, leading his country through the difficult transition period. Nehru had to cope with the influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan, the problem of integrating the princely states into the new federal structure, and war with Pakistan (1948) over Kashmir and with China (1962).
In International affairs he pursue a policy of strict nonalignment, a difficult course in the cold-war years; his neutralism broke down, however, when he asked for western aid during the Sino-Indian conflict. A firm upholder of democratic socialism at home, Nehru remained immensely popular in India. In January 1964, after 17 years in office, he suffered a stroke. He died four months later. Nehru was the author of many books, including an autobiography, Toward Freedom (1941).


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25 June 2012

Biography of Mahatma Gandhi


Biography of Mahatma Gandhi

Mohan Das Karamchand Gandhi : Breaking Knowledge


A Thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black – and – white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow – stripe apple. Below this, there’s a slangily American injection to “Think Different”. Such is the present-day power of business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaign. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on message”, in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.
The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M. K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suite, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.
“Think Different”. Gandhi in his younger days a sophisticated and westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, “He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages”. This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction of thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, a historical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reunited to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.
Richard Attenborough’s much-Oscared movie Gandhi, struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint making. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that other might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw.
But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplification and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African anti-apartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film’s galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted “International Gandhi” has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.
The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he’s darned so dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums (“An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind”) with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, “I think it would be a great idea”). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably – and literallt – translated into English by the novelist G. V. Desani as “Action – Slave Fascination – Moon Grocer”, and he was rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.
Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside. He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India., yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian National Congress’s fold led to the partition of the country. (For all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him “Mr. Gandhi” instead of “Mahatma”, and booed off the stage by the Gandhi’s supporters. Later his withdrawal, under pressure from Jwaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself, ended the last faint chance of avoiding partition.)
He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on hunger strike to force one of his capitalist’s employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment.
He sought to improve the conditions of the untouchables, yet in today’s India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits and forming and increasingly well-organized with the effective political grouping, have rallied around the memory of their own leader, Bhimarao Ramji Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi’s. As Ambedkar’s star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi’s stature has been reduced.
The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive nonviolence, but spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements, and the beneficial properties of human excrement.
Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a sixteen-year-old youth, he’d been making love to his wife, Kasturba, at the moment of his father’s death, Gandhi later forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age with what he called his “brahmacharya experiments”, during which naked young man would be asked to lie with all night so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control over his “vital fluids” would enhance his spiritual powers).
He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the arch proponent of modernization, and it was Nehru’s vision, not Gandhi’s that was eventually – and perhaps inevitably – preferred.
Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and nonviolence should be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques because of their own nature, other oppressors might not.
Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violence, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the Independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain and – as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division – the gradual collapse of the Raj’s bureaucratic hold over India from the mid ’30’s onward did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi’s. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India’s arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.
These days few people pause to consider the complex character of Gandhi’s personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or even the real cause of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing times, and we don’t have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose “little father” – Bapu – he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being a secularized state, but Gandhi’s vision was essentially religious. However, he “recoiled” from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. “He turned to the legends and stories from the India’s popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of the history”.
It didn’t work. In today’s India, Hindu nationalism is rampant in the form of the Bhartiya Janta Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned.
In the early 1970s the writer Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi’s leading political associates, a former Governor-General of independent India, C.Rajagopalachari. His verdict on Gandhi’s legacy is disenchanted, but in today’s India, on the fast track to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: “The glamour of modern technology, money, and power is to seductive that no one – I mean no one – can resist it. The handful of Gandhian who still believe in his philosophy of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks”.
What, then is greatness? In what does it reside? If a man’s project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was “as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of truth, quite, peaceful, determined, and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences”. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi later said, “More than his words, his life was his message”. These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of many to praise Gandhi’s achievement; Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, and all the world’s peace movement have followed in his footsteps. Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global Mc Culture ( Mac culture too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We’ll see.


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