When she met her future husband Rajiv Gandhi as an Italian student in Cambridge, she could not imagine how radically her life would change. In the first years of her marriage, when she was getting to know India from the home of prime minister Indira Gandhi,  her mother-in-law, Sonia Gandhi managed to stay away from politics. But after her husband, who followed up his mother when she was murdered by one of her own guards in 1984, was himself killed in a terrorist attack, she realized she could no longer keep away from Indian politics. As a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, she follows in the footsteps of her husband, his mother and her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the service of a democratic, prosperous and multicultural India.

Nexus Lecture 2007: Living Politics. What India Has Taught Me