Early Life and Career (1904-47)
Shastri was born in Ramnagar in the varanasi district of the United Provinces, British India in British ruled India. His father, Shri Sharada Srivastava Prasad, was a school teacher, who later became a clerk in the Revenue Office at Allahabad. Shastri's father died when he was only an year old. His mother, Ramdulari Devi, took him and his two sisters to her father's house and settled down there.
Shastri ji was educated at East Central Railway Inter college in Mughalsarai and Varanasi. He graduated with a first-class degree from the Kashi Vidyapeeth in 1926. He was given the title Shastri ("Scholar"). The title was a bachelor's degree awarded by the Vidya Peeth, but it stuck as part of his name. Shastri was influenced by major Indian nationalist leaders including Gandhi and Tilak. Later he was greatly influenced by the socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru, whose left-wing faction in the Congress party he would eventually join.
On 16 May 1928, Shastri married Lalita Devi of Mirzapur. He had five children, including Hari Krishna Shashtri, Anil Shastri and Sunil Shashtri, who were all Congress politicians. His son Anil Shastri is still a senior leader of the Congress party.
Read more about this topic: Lal Bahadur Shastri
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Nothing goes sour more easily than the life of pleasure.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)