For me the only point that has remained unchanged through the years is that in India there is still so much poverty.

As a nation, I believe we've acquired faith in ourselves.

In fact the communists gained strength in India when the people thought my party was moving to the right. And they were correct.

You must also understand us - always undervalued, underestimated, not believed. Even when we believed, you didn't believe us. You said, 'How is it possible to fight without violence?' But without violence we obtained freedom.

A nation' s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.

My fiancé, you see, belonged to another religion. He was a Parsi. And this was something nobody could stand - all of India was against us. They wrote to Gandhi, to my fther, to me. Insults, death threats. Every day the postman arrived with an enormous sack and dumped the letters on the floor. We even stopped reading them; we let a couple of friends read them and tell us what was in them.

With boys I climbed trees, ran races, and wrestled. I had no complexes of envy or inferiority toward boys. At the same time, however, I liked dolls.