Our grandparents applied one golden rule in raising us — that we live just as we would as members of a farmer’s household in our native Bijapur, and … - Basappa Danappa Jatti

One phone call from anyone in his office could have got us admission in an elite school in Delhi. We were admitted instead in the Delhi Kannada School at Khan Market. Clearly, grandfather did not want us to pick up any notion that we belonged to the privileged class. Our fellow students here were mostly children of Kannadigas working in offices in Delhi.

My government pledges itself to fulfill in every way the mandate given to it by the people. In doing so, it will not take the people for granted or assume they know nothing and that the government alone knows all answers and solutions. The traumatic experience of the last two years [Emergency] during which many atrocities were committed on the people and they had to undergo untold sufferings and some have even died, has brought home the relevance of this.

His acting presidency was not without controversy. When in April 1977, the then Union Home Minister, Charan Singh, took the debatable decision to dissolve the Assemblies of nine States, he declined to sign the order, and broke the tradition of the President accepting the advice of the Cabinet. Though he later signed the order, he took the stand that the Centre's action should not only be politically and constitutionally correct but also appear to be proper.