Early Life and Education
Kiran Bedi was born in Amritsar, Punjab, India. She is the second of four daughters of Prakash Peshawaria and Prem Peshawaria. Her three sisters are; Shashi, an artist settled in Canada, Reeta, a clinical psychologist and writer, and Anu, a lawyer.
She attended the Sacred Heart Convent School, Amritsar, where she joined the National Cadet Corps(NCC). She took up tennis, a passion she inherited from her father, a tennis player. She won the Junior National Lawn Tennis Championship in 1966, the Asian Lawn Tennis Championship in 1972, and the All-India Interstate Women's Lawn Tennis Championship in 1976. In addition, she also won the All-Asian Tennis Championship, and won the Asian Ladies Title at the age of 22.
She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English (Hons.) from the Government College for Women, Amritsar in 1968. She then earned a Master’s degree in Political Science from Punjab University, Chandigarh, graduating at the top of her class in 1970. She later obtained Bachelor of Laws in 1988 from Faculty of Law, University of Delhi. In 1993, she obtained a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Department of Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, where the topic of her thesis was 'Drug Abuse and Domestic Violence'.
In 1972, Kiran Bedi married Brij Bedi, a textile machine manufacturer whom she met at the Amritsar tennis courts. Neither of them were particularly religious, so they married in a quasi-religious ceremony at a local Shiva temple. Three years later, in 1975, they had daughter Saina, who is now also involved in community service. In one of her lectures to a corporate meeting, Kiran Bedi expressed her belief that everyone in society has an important role to play which will enable others to fulfill their duties (or important tasks), quoting the example of her uneducated housemaid whose help in Bedi's daily household work had helped Bedi to complete an important task of writing a book.
Read more about this topic: Kiran Bedi
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The life of mind is best and pleasantest for man, since mind more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Very likely education does not make very much difference.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)