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An Autobiography: Toward Freedom
First published in 1936, and now available in a centenary edition, this book was written by Nehru almost entirely in prison from June 1934 to February 1935. His account, though replete with autobiographical details, is much more than a personal document; in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, "Through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the
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Paperback
,
648 pages
Published
September 27th 1989
by Bodley Head
(first published 1940)
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Jawaharlal Nehru, a man I shall always be sorry I never met, wrote a desperately fascinating book! Arguably the most under-rated book of the twentieth century.
Jawaharlal Nehru can only be described as Plato's philosopher king . He was an extraordinary writer, incredible reader, incorruptible statesman, and a technology lover who had romantic relationship with environment, democracy and justice. So it would be impossible to write about him without romantic manner. As Introduction goes, "What is t ...more
Jawaharlal Nehru can only be described as Plato's philosopher king . He was an extraordinary writer, incredible reader, incorruptible statesman, and a technology lover who had romantic relationship with environment, democracy and justice. So it would be impossible to write about him without romantic manner. As Introduction goes, "What is t ...more
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Whenever I read Pandit Nehru I feel like my father is writing to me. The quality of prose is exquisite and seldom other writer match this skill. Nehru's first book I read is 'Discovery of India'. But after reading 'Glimpses of world history 'I became staunch admirer of Nehru. When I was reading 'Glimpses of world history' I decided to read his autobiography. This is long book of 650 pages but book flows with the masterly prose of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. You can find plenty of quotable quotes in
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A bright, thoughtful, lively, insightful and passionate individual, not presented with all the answers in life, but with a strong curiosity to learn. I was moved by his reflections on marriage, religion, colonialism, nature and life.
"I am afraid our veneer of civilized conduct is thin enough, and, when passions are aroused, it rubs off and reveals something that is not good to look at."
"To me these years have brought one rich gift among many others. More and more I have looked upon life as an ad ...more
"I am afraid our veneer of civilized conduct is thin enough, and, when passions are aroused, it rubs off and reveals something that is not good to look at."
"To me these years have brought one rich gift among many others. More and more I have looked upon life as an ad ...more
The first 400 pages were just like I felt in India: a mess. It looked like all the Congress activity was chaotic and pointless and all those politicians seemed a bit ridiculous - or maybe absurd? But it was fluently written and in a way it all came together, so I went 'til the end. And amazingly enough I enjoyed the last part: the analysis of a number of social, political and national aspects was a lot deeper than the first part had shown him capable of. Indeed his thoughts were bigger than his
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I started this book, with great anticipation to look at the pieces of Indo Pak history and condition of India (Pre Partitioned), though it give a great deal of light on the personality and life of Mr. Nehru, yet it seized to give a account of the situation.
It shows how hollow the thinking of those leaders of Congress. They were split and they all were having different dimensions, yet the course of history made them hero. I do give respect to the suffering they went into due to the cause of indep ...more
It shows how hollow the thinking of those leaders of Congress. They were split and they all were having different dimensions, yet the course of history made them hero. I do give respect to the suffering they went into due to the cause of indep ...more
Never mind! Wasn't expecting anything fruitful.
Opens you into the world of 1920's and 30's. Also the author's impartial take on things is something to reckon.
Its more on the history of India. beautifully written and Nehru has clearly mentioned the conflicts in ideology he had with Gandhi at times. A better way to learn history of India during the independence struggle.
Really felt like i should have been living during the time. JLN tends to bring out a lot of soul of the pre independence era, his own likes, dislikes, shortcomings, besides his time during his jail terms. I personally felt very near JLN whenever the mentions of his life in jail came up. the book is essentially unputdownable. Tends to bring out the human element of great people.
Nehru as a politician, or more precisely as Prime Minister, may not be held in esteem by one and all. But the ideas in this book are definitely worthy of admiration. I would recommend this book to everybody; the richness of his ideas make this book worth a read!
In just two word, i think , it is a 'Tremendous book'. Got familiar with Nehru ji modern thinking about life, Nation, society, economy, politics etc. Very worthily book to read if you have some ideas about modern history of India.
ဘာသာေရး ေနာကခံကား အေရာငရငလွေသာ တိုငးျပညႀကီးတစခုမွ ဘာသာမဲေခါငးေဆာငတစဦး။
သိုမဟုတ ဂါဟလာ ေနရူး။
ေနရူးျပတိုကရွိ စာအုပစငတြင ယနးေပါဆတ၏ Being and Nothingness စာအုပႀကီးအား ခနခနျငားျငား ေတြခဲရ၏။ ...more
သိုမဟုတ ဂါဟလာ ေနရူး။
ေနရူးျပတိုကရွိ စာအုပစငတြင ယနးေပါဆတ၏ Being and Nothingness စာအုပႀကီးအား ခနခနျငားျငား ေတြခဲရ၏။ ...more
He's quite frank here. Sometimes, I couldn't help thinking "this guy is not THAT brilliant a leader". In that sense, this book gives good insights into the minds of those involved in indian freedom struggle.
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First prime minister of independent India (1947 – 64). Son of the independence advocate Motilal Nehru (1861 – 1931), Nehru was educated at home and in Britain and became a lawyer in 1912. More interested in politics than law, he was impressed by Mohandas K. Gandhi's approach to Indian independence. His close association with the Indian National Congress began in 1919; in 1929 he became its preside
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“What the mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much that I do not believe in. I find myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of surprise to me. Any idea of a personal God seems very odd to me.”
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