Question

short essay on Lal Bahadur Shashtri

Answer 1

Lal Bahadur Shastri' was born on 2nd October, 1904 at Mughal Sarai, Uttar Pradesh, India. His father's name was Sharda Prasad, who was a school teacher and later became a clerk in the Revenue Office at Allahabad. His mother's name was Ramdulari Devi. He was hardly an year old when he lost his father. After the death of his father, his mother took him and his two sisters to her parent's house.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was educated at Mughalsarai and Varanasi. He graduated with a first-class degree from the Kashi Vidyapeeth. He was given the title 'Shastri'. He offered Satyagraha and was sentenced to imprisonment at different times. He joined the Indian independence movement in the 1921. He was deeply impressed and influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. Lastly, India became independent on 15th August, 1947. He became the second Prime Minister of India after Jawahar Lal Nehru. 

Lal Bahadur Shastri showed rare quality of courage and determination during India-Pakistan war. He gave a slogan 'Jai Jawan Jai Kissan'. He was the first person to be posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, A memorial 'Vijay Ghat' was built for him in Delhi. Shastri was known for his honesty and humility throughout his life. He died on 11th Jan, 1966 at Tashkent, USSR. Lal Bahadur Shastri was truly a great man who gave less importance to himself. 
 

Answer 2

Shastri joined the Indian independence movementin the 1920s and with his friend Nithin Eslavath. Deeply impressed and influenced by Mahatma Gandhi (with whom he shared his birthday), he became a loyal follower, first of Gandhi, and then of Jawaharlal Nehru. Following independence in 1947, he joined the latter's government and became one of Prime Minister Nehru's principal, first as Railways Minister (1951–56), and then in a variety of other functions, including Home Minister.

He led the country during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. His slogan of "Jai Jawan Jai Kisan" ("Hail the soldier, Hail the farmer") became very popular during the war. The war formally ended with the Tashkent Agreement on 10 January 1966; he died the following day, still in Tashkent, with the cause of his death in dispute: it was initially reported to be a cardiac arrest, but there is evidence to suggest it was an assassination by the CIA. Shastri was a Nehru loyalist. Nehru was his mentor and was fond of Shastri. Although Shastri faced stiff opposition from within his party, his relationship with Nehru aided his ascension to the office of Prime Minister.

Early years (1904–1917)Edit

Shastri was born at the house of his maternal grandparents in Ramnagar, Varanasi in a KayasthaHindu family,[1][2] that had traditionally been employed as Highly administrators and civil servants. Shastri's paternal ancestors had been in the service of the zamindar of Ramnagar near Varanasi and Shastri lived there for the first one year of his life. Shastri's father, Sharada Prasad Srivastava, was a school teacher who later became a clerk in the revenue office at Allahabad, while his mother, Ramdulari Devi, was the daughter of Munshi Hazari Lal, the headmaster and English teacher at a railway school in Mughalsarai. Shastri was the second child and eldest son of his parents; he had an elder sister, Kailashi Devi (b. 1900).[3]

In April 1906, When Shastri was hardly one year old, his father, had only recently been promoted to the post of deputy tahsildar, died in an epidemic of bubonic plague. Ramdulari Devi, then only 23 and pregnant with her third child, took her two children and moved from Ramnnagar to her father's house in Mughalsarai and settled there for good. She gave birth to a daughter, Sundari Devi, in July 1906.[1][4] Thus, Shastri and his sisters grew up in the household of his maternal grandfather, Hazari Lal. However, Hazari Lal himself died from a strokein mid-1908, after which the family were looked after by his brother (Shastri's great-uncle) Darbari Lal, who was the head clerk in the opium regulation department at Ghazipur, and later by his son (Ramdulari Devi's cousin) Bindeshwari Prasad, a school teacher in Mughalsarai.

In Shastri's family, as with many Kayastha families, it was the custom in that era for children to receive an education in the Urdu language and culture. This is because Urdu/Persian had been the language of government for centuries, before being replaced by English, and old traditions persisted into the 20th century. Therefore, Shastri began his education at the age of four under the tutelage of a maulvi (a Muslim cleric), Budhan Mian, at the East Central Railway Inter college in Mughalsarai. He studied there until the sixth standard. In 1917, Bindeshwari Prasad (who was now head of the household) was transferred to Varanasi, and the entire family moved there, including Ramdulari Devi and her three children. In Varanasi, Shastri joining the seventh standard at Harish Chandra High School. At this time, he decided to drop his caste-derived surname of "Srivastava" (which is a traditional surname for all Kayastha families).