World Leaders Biography

What a world of difference there is between hearing and seeing from the outside and the actual experience. No one who has not been in prison for any length of time can ever visualize the numbness of spirit that can creep over one when, as Oscar Wilde writes: "Each day is like a year, a year whose days are long." When day after day is wrapped in sameness, spite and deliberate humiliation. As Pethick-Lawrence said: "The essential fact in the life of the prisoner is that he takes on a subhuman status. Herded together like animals, devoid of dignity of privacy, debarred not only from outside company or news but from all beauty and colour, softness and grace, the ground, the walls, everything around us was mud coloured and so became our jail-washed clothes. Even our food tasted gritty. Through the barred apertures we were exposed to the loo (hot summer wind) and dust storms, the monsoon downpour and the winter cold. Others had an interview and letter once or twice a mo

I was highly suspicious. I didn't know what was happening. Finally, when I got through to Feroze, who was with my father, he said: "Well, apart from everything else we haven't got much to eat and you can't bring the children." I said: "l shall bring lots of potatoes and everybody can live on potatoes. He said that the situation was dangerous. I said: "Well, if it is dangerous, that is one more reason why I should be there rather than sitting here on my own." So, I packed up and came down the same evening, bringing as many potatoes as I could — two sacks full I think. When we arrived in Dehra Dun we heard that there had just been a riot. Then, in Shahdara or somewhere between there and Delhi, the train stopped where it was not supposed to stop. I was..actually washing — because Indian trains are pretty dirty with the coal — as we were about to arrive. I looked out to see why the train had stopped and I found people chasing somebody. I g