There are three other aspects of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nehru Lecture that fascinate me. I’ll address them in successive posts starting today. The first is what she has to say about the choice she made to dedicate her life to politics – a term the BBC placed in the title of its excellent September 2012 documentary, and that she then used in her lecture a couple of months later.

She begins by describing a very difficult personal dilemma faced by Nehru in 1934 during one of his many terms of imprisonment, and subsequently reported in his autobiography. His wife Kamala was sick, and would in fact die less than two years later at the age of 36. This is how Aung San Suu Kyi captures the situation: “it was suggested to him ‘through various intermediaries’ that if he were to give an assurance, even an informal one, that he would keep away from politics for the rest of the term to which he had been sentenced, he would be released to tend to his ailing wife.” He refused to do so, and Kamala later affirmed his decision: “What is this about your giving an assurance to Government? Do not give it!”

Aung San Suu Kyi then discloses her fascination with Nehru’s action and reasoning, placing herself entirely on his side: “I have to confess that I wholly endorsed his stand on the matter.” She also spells out the moral she took from the story: “The lesson I really learnt however was not to deceive myself, or others, with the claim that we are making self-sacrifices when we follow our conscience; we are simply making a choice and possibly an egoistic one at that. When we give up what is dear to our hearts is it not sometimes to make ourselves less vulnerable? The ones who make the real sacrifices are those who let us go free to keep our secret trysts with destiny.”

There’s little new in this passage, and I’ve certainly encountered pithier versions. In The Lady, for instance, her character explains by phone to younger son Kim why she’s not present in Oxford with dying husband Michael: “But I can’t! My hands are tied!” What is valuable in the Nehru Lecture is the striking honesty with which Aung San Suu Kyi dissects perhaps the most famous aspect of her persona.