Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial, Rampur, Varanasi
Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second prime minister of India and much loved politician may be the real unsung part of UP. His village Ramnagar, on the other shore of Ganga has a small memorial dedicated to him at the house or hut where he was born and spent his early days.
I remember during school days when we had to write an essay on him, we read that he swam 3 Kms across Ganga to reach his school on the other shore. As I stood at the balcony of Ramnagar palace, with Ganga flowing gently on the surface past Varanasi’s moon shaped ghats, the visual of a small boy crossing the wide river flashed across. It kind of told me the character of the boy who would do that hard work to get himself educated.
His ancestral house that primarily has only his pictures that too sponsored by a bank. It may look small to you, but let me tell you this house is much bigger than the original house of the Shastris, which was just one room, and that too may have been a mud or a kuchha one. Rest of the structure has been built later. Ironical that a memorial gets a bigger space than the person whose memorial it is.
This is the simplest memorial that you would see of a national leader. There is a picture of him with his extended family and one in which both he and his wife are working on board an aircraft when he was the PM.
The humble statue on the road leading to the memorial may be the gentle reminder to the visitors of the grand palace that there is another worthy son of the soil, and you may want to see his house.
How you wish Karmath people like Shastri Ji got their due, encouraging others who would want to take his path.
0 评论: