NEW DELHI, July 29 -- I was an impressionable 10-year-old when US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. It made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi had not impacted me as much because I was just an idea in the minds of my parents when Godse shot the Father of the Nation at close range at Birla House on January 30, 1948.

One of the first things I did upon reaching Delhi in 1973 was to visit the Gandhi Memorial. The closest I had come to Gandhi was when I read his autobiography and visited the mobile Gandhi museum that came to Pathanamthitta in Kerala during Gandhi's birth centenary in 1969.

I have vivid memories of the assassinations of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, and her son Rajiv...