Shri Lal Krishna Advani Ji enters the hundredth year of his life today, 8th November. This year, his birthday fittingly coincides with Diwali, a festival associated with Prabhu Shri Ram and the Diya, at a time when we are marking 75 years since the inception of the Jana Sangh, 125th Jayanti of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and recently celebrated a hundred years of the RSS.

There are very few people whose lives have touched so many different chapters of modern India. Advani Ji was born on 8th November 1927, on Dev Deepawali. As a youngster in 1947, he experienced the pain of leaving behind his familiar world in Sindh. He rebuilt his life from scratch without bitterness. This trait of being able to build from scratch, against all odds, has stayed with him throughout. It was seen while he was strengthening the Jana Sangh and later building the BJP. His tenures as BJP president saw the Congress falling sharply from 400 to below 200 in 1989 and the BJP becoming the single largest party for the first time in 1996.…