Gayatri Devi recently passed away! Who was she? She was the Maharani (Princess) of Jaipur, the city where my parents both came from. Following India’s independence and the change in government from princely states to a democracy, she became an incredibly successful politician with the biggest landslide victory in the world (192,909 votes out of 246,516 cast). The reason I found her so interesting was the contrast in her personality – royalty, and widely considered to be one of the most classically beautiful women in India in her youth, but also a tomboy who learned riding, spent a lot of time with servants, and did a lot of big game hunting. She personally hunted and killed 27 tigers! Damn.
If you’re curious, here’s a link to her wikipedia article, and here’s the great obituary that ran in the Economist. Apologies if I’m a little helter-skelter, it’s been a crazy couple of days. Oh, I have internet now. :)
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 10:43 PM and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
New people die everyday. But this year, widely-known people pass away everyday. What the blast is going on?
There was a bunch of uh… “spammy” words at the beginning of the excerpt in my feed reader.
Damn! Thanks, we’ll look into it.
“Spammy” words showed up in my Google reader as well.
Thanks, we’ll look into it!
All I could see in google reader was spam words. Yeesh.
Thank you, we’ll take a look! :)
Wasn’t the largest landslide victory General Washington’s presidential election, with a unanimous popular vote?
27 tigers? She would’ve been the woman of my dreams, if I knew who she was back then.