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NEHRU-
Glimpses of Greatness
PD Tandon
P.D.Tandon is a freedom fighter,
a former minister, author and a journalist. His name appears on
about 46 books in five languages. Gandhiji wrote a foreword to his
book “Nehru Your Neighbour". Tandon was closely associated
with the Nehru-Gandhi family. He has a large number of letters from
Indira Gandhi , Rajiv Gandhi and several from Jawaharlal Nehru.Tandon
was a minister in the U.P. Government and was also a member of the
UP Legislative Council for sixteen years.
He shares with us his memories of Pandit Nehru:
I once addressed a meeting at Ewing Christian
College, Allahabad, which was presided over by Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri.
The subject of my talk was “Do you know Jawaharlal ?”
I narrated several human stories about Nehru, and Mr. Shastri also
recalled a few interesting the early morning have much plane in
the early winter morning when it was still dark and the stars were
incidents of Nehru’s life.
A day before the general elections in 1937, Mr. Shastri said that
Nehru went to address a big public meeting at Mirzapur and when
he found that there was no loudspeaker for his use and people were
rushing towards the rostrum, he shouted at the organizers and asked,
“Have you never heard that in this world there is a thing
called a loud—speaker ? Have you never seen it ? How am I
to address this big crowd without a loud- speaker ?” The local
leaders at Mirzapur got unnerved, but that did not improve the situation
and the crowd continued moving to-wards the dais till there was
no space to put one’s foot upon . It was all a sea of human
heads. Nehru got irritated at the behaviour of the crowd and he
jumped over them and started running over their heads, then suddenly
the crowd realized that Nehru had got angry and was leaving the
meeting and they started shouting, “Sit down, sit down,”
and immediately everybody sat down quietly and he addressed the
meeting.
When Nehru was returning home, he said to Mr. Shastri, “Did
you see my performance today—how I controlled the crowd ?”
Mr. Shastri stated that he was impressed and added, “I was
feeling bad that you were wearing your sandals and you trod over
their heads.”
Another story that Mr. Shastri related was about Nehru’s considerate
nature. After an election meeting in 1937 Nehru was returning to
Allahabad with a couple of colleagues. He himself was driving the
car. It was a cold, winter night and there was fog all around. It
was difficult to drive, but he decided to see everyone home. As
he was driving along, a cow crossed the way and despite his best
efforts the car hit the animal, breaking one of her horns. It was
dark, and perhaps none noticed the incident, but Nehru stopped the
car to meet the owner of the cow. After a few minutes some people
passed that way and when they saw Nehru worrying about the accident,
they requested him to get along and not to bother, but he did not
leave before he made them promise to send the owner of the cow to
Anand Bhawan next morning. When the man came and met Nehru he got
a substantial sum for the treatment of his injured cow.
Most people know about Nehru’s being impatient of incompetence.
Those who worked with him and lived around him knew how much he
disliked inefficiency. They had to be extremely alert all the time
in order to be efficient according to the Nehru standards.
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