Early Life
Baba Amte was born to Devidas and Laxmibai Amte in the town of Hinganghat in Wardha District of Maharashtra. The family was a wealthy jagirdar Brahmin family. His father was also a British official with responsibilities for district administration and revenue collection. Amte had acquired his nickname Baba in his childhood.
He came to be known as Baba not because "he is a saint or any such thing, but because his parents addressed him by that name." (as explained by his wife Sadhanatai Amte)
As the eldest son of a wealthy Brahmin landowner, Murlidhar had an idyllic childhood. By the time he was fourteen, Baba owned his own gun and hunted boar and deer. He developed a special interest in cinema, wrote reviews for the film magazine The Picture Goer and even corresponded with Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. (Norma Shearer would become one of his first foreign donors when he began working with leprosy patients.) When he was old enough to drive, Baba was given a Singer sportscar with cushions covered with panther skin! But even then, Amte did not appreciate the restrictions that prevented him from playing with the 'low-caste' servants' children.
"There is a certain callousness in families like mine." Baba says. "They put up strong barriers so as not to see the misery in the world outside and I rebelled against it."
Read more about this topic: Baba Amte
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Although good early childhood programs can benefit all children, they are not a quick fix for all of society’s ills—from crime in the streets to adolescent pregnancy, from school failure to unemployment. We must emphasize that good quality early childhood programs can help change the social and educational outcomes for many children, but they are not a panacea; they cannot ameliorate the effects of all harmful social and psychological environments.”
—Barbara Bowman (20th century)
“The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)