Kobad gandhi biography
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He abandoned his plans of becoming a chartered accountant and decided to return to India in 1972 to dedicate his life to working with the downtrodden of the country. One needs the jail superintendent’s permission even to get a pen and paper. Love finds a way for itself. The autobiography titled ‘Fractured Freedom’ symbolically and aptly imprints the journey of a spirit who noted the fractures in the socio-political fabrics of the nation.
He paid a cruel price for his idealism: 10 years in jails, on terrorism-related charges that were thrown out by courts. At liberty now, Ghandy speaks to FEZANA Talks from Mumbai and shares stories from his memoir.
VIDEO RECORDING OF THE TALK
Speaker Bios
Kobad Ghandy was born into an affluent Bombay Parsi family, graduated from an elite high school, and was on his way to qualifying as a chartered accountant in London when he changed course.
He was an accused prisoner, not a convicted prisoner. In the book, Fractured Freedom, he maintained that he was tortured for seven years in the ‘Tihar jail.’ He writes, “No place is as bad as Tihar, a jail that is ‘structured to crush you’. During his days in England, he suffered from an identity crisis.
His life has inspired lurid headlines and been fictionalized in Bollywood. When the nation was engulfed by hatred, the couple found hope in love. It is a Non-bail-able act. This was something that caused a massive uproar in the literary and political spheres. The exchange of fire near Theni river in Tamil Nadu two years ago forced the Maoist party to slow down on its plans.
Kobad Ghandy was born to Nergis and Adi.
Adi was a senior finance executive in Glaxo. We may fancily call it ‘the Four Decades’. And hence, they continued with their activism under any circumstances. Mulaqaat is difficult to arrange for those lodged in Tihar. As if the torture was the reward he deserved for a decade in jail.
Then, shouldn’t one assume that Kobad Ghandy was jailed for his unconditional service to the poor and tribal of this country?
After reading Karl Marx and other left revolutionaries and their treatises, the young Kobad Ghandy understood the socio-political and economic condition of the downtrodden people in the world and particularly in India.
Even in Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh, the party failed to win over people in plain areas and in towns, while the movement was getting strengthened in tribal belts. With the Maoist party realising that it was consistently failing in garnering support from the middle class and the intellectual sections of society, it had asked Ghandy to devise strategies and identify issues that could win over these two sections.
He first became active in socio-political activities in Mumbai during the tenure of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. As it were to turn out, nothing worked.