Pub meeting to public life

 

 

“I was thinking back and remembering how I had first seen you in the upstairs back room of the Varsity (pub). From that moment I had known that you were for me! Funny how things sometimes just click." Thus wrote Rajiv Gandhi in a letter to Sonia in 1983.

It was at that pub in Cambridge where it all started. The grandson of India’s demised premier, Rajiv Gandhi and the beautiful Sonia Maino, a girl from an Italian working class family who worked in a restaurant to pay for her tuition fees. And even Sonia recalls that it was instant love! Rajiv was in Cambirdge University and she was learning English there in an institute. Before that, all she knew about India was the stereotype of snake charmers and elephants, but the dashing young man was completely out of that stereotype.

Sonia's parents were reluctant to allow her to become involved with a person from such a different culture. “I had not been able to muster enough courage to tell my parents about my feelings for a boy who was to them not only stranger but a foreigner," Sonia later wrote.

Rajiv wrote in a letter to his mother Indira- "Sonia does not seem to be able to talk to her parents. I can't quite understand what it is. It seems very peculiar. She just does whatever her father says."

She was also nervous about meeting Rajiv's mother Indira Gandhi, who had become Prime Minister during their three-year courtship. But Sonia recalls the very first meeting when Indira said: “Sonia, I am a mother, don't be afraid of me." Sonia says: "I felt very happy hearing this." Finally, Sonia and Rajiv were married in a simple ceremony in New Delhi on February 25, 1968, on Basant Panchami, the same day Indira Gandhi had married Feroze a few decades earlier. Sonia traded her miniskirts for the same pink sari her mother-in-law had worn at her own wedding many years ago. Despite her initial aversion for politics, that pub meeting has finally catapulted Sonia Gandhi to public life, and now she rules India’s oldest political party