As Rahul Gandhi set out on his journey to ‘discover India’, I found that somehow he had also set my pulse racing. Admittedly, that lasted only for a while, but I was surprised at my response. It defied decades of my training as a political scientist. Even worse, it defied common sense.

What could possibly explain this extravagant response? Was it that there still lived within my deep recesses a naïve, young man who had been brought up in the heady, early years of Independence? A man who lay buried under the debris of cynical and callous politics of later decades, but was somehow still alive.

Born six years after Nehru’s Discovery of India was published in 1946, I read it some years later in college, as also his famous midnight speech about India’s tryst with destiny. Together, they had set my pulse racing. Here was a leader, who had discovered for himself and for all of us the soul of an eternal India. Here was a leader who gave us a vision of where we, an ancient people, were headed as a modern nation.

I cannot possibly count the number of times I went back to these two most magical pieces of writing.

Last week, I picked up the book again. While the magic had faded a little, there was no denying the power of his words. The words were steeped in his immense faith in the land, in its people, and in their collective wisdom to build a better future for themselves. Above all, the words reflected his unyielding resolve: “I was not interested in making some political arrangements which would enable our people to carry on more or less as before, only a little better. I felt they had vast stores of suppressed energy and ability, and I wanted to release these and make them feel young and vital again. India, constituted as she is, cannot play a secondary role in the world. She will either count for a great deal or not count at all. No middle position attracted me.”

... contd.