I was remembering the other day of the show on my TV scree two years with Sushma Swaraj wailing that if a foreigner were to become the Prime Minister, she would eat gram, sleep on the floor and cut off her hair remembering the occasion as a day of mourning when Indian culture and values would be forever buried. Of course due to a combination of these histrionics and the now famous inner voice, the phenomenon of an Italian born lady albeit an Indian citizen assuming the post of prime minister never happened and Sushmaji got to eat her normal food and sleep on a bed and also keep her hair.
Sonia Gandhi is of course Italian born and was married to a man who himself was a product of a cross cultural marriage between a Parsi and a Kashmiri Brahmin settled in Allahabad for close to a hundred years(Motilal Nehru’s father was the chief of police in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar). With all this mixed up blood flowing through the family’s veins, it was perhaps legitimate for Sushma Swaraj and those who backed her to worry about the demise of Indian heritage in the family and the future of the country if Rahul Gandhi were to be the heir apparent.
On the other hand we have Rahul Mahajan, the son of a RSS Pracharak in former times and at the time of his death, a leading light of the party claiming to be the custodian of Indian values and heritage. It is in this context that it is amusing to compare how Rahul Gandhi (and his sister) have conducted themselves vis a vis Rahul Mahajan. Of course it is understood that children once adults choose their own path and the values they choose to live by but it was still ironic to read in a news paper editorial that looking at the conduct of Rahul Gandhi both in his times of tragedy and victory has conducted himself with more dignity and grace than the other Rahul, whose father had sworn to protect the Indian way of life.
The newspaper editorial( Indian Express, I think) went on to contrast Rahul Mahajan in his jeans and goggles lighting his father’s funeral pyre versus Rahul Gandhi doing the same in a sober kurta pyjama and wondered aloud if Sonia , for all her foreignness had been ultimately been successful in actually epitomizing the ideal Indian woman by being the caring daughter in law to Indira , a protective wife to Rajiv and finally a mother to her children for many of their formative years and largely perhaps shaping her children’s understanding of what is good and proper in Indian culture and tradition. Just goes to show that it is forever helpful to hold one’s peace than rave and rant thoughts and comments that might echo back at our own door step