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Someone said to me today that the BJP (Bharatiya Jana Sangh) supporters consider May 23 as the “true Independence Day” and that Aug. 15 is pro-Pakistan, Brit-engineered one that Gandhi-Nehru swallowed. After all Godse is a patriot now!
In 1967, I turned 17 and headed to college at Delhi University in July. Earlier that year, in February, there had been a famine in Bihar and a number of students from my college had gone to Bihar to work as relief workers, sponsored by our college.
I came to know most of them. They were one to three years my senior. For some of them it changed their lives forever. One of them told me that the day he saw a long line of children waiting for kichidi at a food kitchen, when their families were eating leaves and raw mango seeds, he started, in earnest, to seek a way to change that.
And like so many, myself included, it changed the way we thought about economic and political relationships.
1967 was…
