Trembling with anticipation, residents of Nadgaon were simply unable to follow the diktat to not crowd around the president, as they rushed to welcome their favourite daughter Pratibha Patil when she arrived on Friday.
Trembling with anticipation, residents of Nadgaon were simply unable to follow the diktat to not crowd around the president, as they rushed to welcome their favourite daughter Pratibha Patil when she arrived on Friday.
While security agencies had allowed only 46 people to gather at her ancestral house, around 150 people thronged there making it difficult for Patil to have an uninterrupted chat with relatives.
Overcome by emotion upon meeting her relatives, Patil had to extend her stay in the house by 15 minutes over the scheduled 40 minutes.
It was Patil’s first visit to Nadgaon, her birthplace, after becoming president in 2007. She performed a puja of her family goddess Chamunda for the first 10 minutes and then shared moments of her life with her close relatives including cousin Shantabai Rajput, 86, who had come from Pachora, around 90km from Nadgaon. Rajput hugged Patil tight when they met.
After the puja, the women in Patil’s family gifted her with a white saree that had a grey border, bangles and a silver idol of Lord Ganesha. Patil, too, gifted the women with sarees that she had brought from Delhi. For the men in the family, she had shawls and sweets.
Patil affectionately enquired after each family member. She was keen to know what was happening in their lives and listened attentively as some of them told her about their family problems. Rajput recalled the days of their childhood in the village. “I am 10 years older than Tai (Patil). We used to sing a song ‘Anganat jai-jui, jawal ga pati majha nahi’ (it roughly translates as ‘the weather is so nice, but I am missing my husband’). I always stopped at the word pati (husband). Tai, too, used to stop at that word though she was not married at the time,” Rajput said.
Co-incidentally, Patil’s husband Devisingh Shekhawat did not accompany her on the visit.
Later, during her address at a function at Bodwad, Patil said, “I am delighted after visiting my birthplace. One cannot explain the joy one gets when one visits one’s maternal relatives.”
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