India and the world got the first real glimpse of this extraordinary man in his most traumatic moment - when he stood as a pillar of quiet dignity while lighting the funeral pyre of his mother. Yes, his trademark smile was gone then and the grief in his soulful eyes reflected that of India's shocked millions. But unlike them, and as was being popularly expected, he did not take time out to mourn. 'This is no time
to mourn. It is time to act. 'Instead, he addressed the nation, exhorting it to leave the pauses for future and its golden moments - moments which, he asserted, could emanate only from present endeavours. Many understood, a few didn't. Rajiv hugged the former with a promise and flicked aside the latter with a bookmark of careful persuasion and reasoning when time permitted.

Time, of course, never did. From the day he wore his mother's mantle on October 31, 1984 till the day in office after a sumptuous five-year, one-month reign, Rajiv was a man in a hurry. As his wife Sonia Gandhi says and almost all have vouched, he was up before dawn and took a breather much after the nation had

retired for the night. His schedule was back-breaking but his face always tireless. His wife saw him only in the wee hours. His children, so used to his presence around them earlier, saw him more rarely than they saw the outside world.

The jiffies, however, were soon forgiven. After all, the young Prime Minister had charted a daunting task for himself. Unburdened with the weight of a veteran, the 40-year-old fresher was adamant to breathe life into a rotten system that had become a shameless mistress of vested interests. His duty, as he would often say, was to remove the cobwebs. He made it his business to cut bureaucratic red tape, go to the people with a begging bowl of faith and see to it that he gave them reason to sport a smile like his.

To get the pulse of his people, he toured the length and breadth of the nation - from the remotest nooks of the North-East, he brought back with him the pleasant surprise of its unvisited people; he was saddened by the conditions of abject poverty he saw in Eastern India, including Bihar and UP; from the southern tip of India he carried back the regional aspirations of a somewhat removed population. He heard them out; he won their trust and he provided a healing touch. In short, he became one with them and yet stayed paces ahead to surmise the problem and evolve a solution.

Rajiv's relentless crusade to discover India won him respect of even his detractors. Among his friends he became an object of leg-pulling tagged as he was 'the touring marathoner'. His family feared for him as much as they missed him at the dinner table. But his intentions soon soared above digs and doubts and his humanness became a point of popular elucidation.

Having seen his constituency at close quarters, the humanist in Rajiv matured into a visionary Prime Minister. He had pinpointed the problem with precision - it was lack of change, lagging the times and a total non-percolation of assigned benefits. His answer to the daunting