Homeless home minister

People used to call him the homeless Home Minister because he did not have a house of his own. He had rented a small house in Allahabad. Even when he was a minister, he used to stay in that house when he went to Allahabad. After a few days the owner of the house let it out to another family. When Shastriji resigned as minister he vacated the government quarters and he did not have a place to line in!

When under the PL 480 programme, America was going to send inferior quality of wheat to India, he opposed it. He asked the nation to go hungry once a day than accept poor quality food from US. Before making this announcement he asked his wife not to cook evening meals. He himself followed what he recommended.

Shastri never made money. In 1963, on the day when he was dropped under the Kamaraj plan a journalist went to meet him. He was sitting in his home without a light. "Why are you sitting in the dark?" the journalist asked. He said, "From today all expenses will be borne by me." He told me as a MP and minister he didn't earn enough to save for his rainy day. On that evening, I told him to turn a columnist to earn some money. So he wrote a column on Lala Lajpat Rai. That was the first syndicated column in India.