The impact on Indian history is undeniable: a nation mourned its beloved daughter and simultaneously displayed its ugliest side for the rest of the world to see.

Rioting in New Delhi led to the killings of innocent Sikhs, destroying families, communities and any semblance of national unity in the country’s darkest days. If you have never seen the film, “Ammu, ” do so.

A quarter century ago, I was a young reporter just learning the business. I penned my emotions about the assassination in a piece that ran in “The Florida Flambeau,” an independent, student-run newspaper that, sadly, is no longer around.

It was a first-person story. I recalled seeing Indira’s black-and-white photo in the stairwell of the Catholic convent school I attended as a 2nd grader. The photo occupied the entire wall of the landing. Every morning I drew hope from it. No matter what you thought of Indira, the politician, she certainly served as inspiration to little brown girls in India.

It was ironic, then, that her death helped launch my career in journalism.

That is what I will think of as I read all the anniversary stories in the next couple of days. And how history might have unfolded differently had she lived.

Gasp.

Silly, lass, I thought, struggling with the fact that I was indeed many years older than she. I envied her youth and scoffed at her eagerness to gallop forward into time.

I don’t scoff anymore.

I turned 47 on Tuesday, a number that would have made me shriek a few years back. But I welcomed it and like my cousin’s wife, I look forward to 50, though I am much closer to it now than she was when she made her shocking declaration.

For the first time in many years, I am working next to people who are, well, very young. I am old enough to be their mother, I tell them. That was perhaps the biggest adjustment for me when I transitioned into a new job at CNN. For so long, I was the kid, surrounded by sage newspaper folks.

I look at my new colleagues and wish them well in their journey. And I’m glad that I have progressed as far as I have. For the things I know. The lessons I learned. The mistakes I made. The joys of love and marriage. And the sorrow of losing a mother, a father and friends and relatives I cherished.

It took 47 years to make me who I am today.

I look forward 50. 60. And beyond.

I hope.

Will you remember me?” 14-year-old Bhavika Vegad asked peering straight into my camera, the smile disappearing from her face.

How could I not? Bhavika’s world was turned upside down when a Jan. 26 earthquake leveled her city. And I was there to bear witness.

All around her, relatives, friends, classmates and teachers perished under the concrete and bricks that tumbled to the ground the day the earth roared in Anjar.

Six days later, a sprightly Bhavika roamed the rubble-filled streets, shielding her nose from the dust and dodging the debris in her path. She followed me from a temporary clinic and shelter halfway to the devastated Mistry Failyu neighborhood.

“I miss going to school, ” she said in almost perfect English. “I miss my friends and teachers.”

No one knew when Bhavika would be able to return to school. Anjar, with 65,000 residents, is a bit bigger than Roswell. And the only thing left here is misery.

Now the journalists have started to leave Gujarat state. The relief agencies are also temporary. But Bhavika’s life has changed forever.

And, yet, in the midst of Gujarat’s tragedy, her face was a ray of hope — an inspiration to begin healing.

When I first arrived in Ahmedabad, the former state capital that has roughly the same population as the Atlanta metro area, the scale of the devastation eluded me. The airport in this industrial center is located in an area that was largely spared.

It was two days after the massive temblor. It was midnight. I had been traveling for almost 24 hours.

I felt lucky that I had been able to reserve a hotel room in a city suddenly bursting at the seams with media, dignitaries and relief workers. All I wanted was the comfort of a clean bed.

The first sign that something was terribly wrong struck me as the auto-rickshaw made its way deeper into the heart of Ahmedabad. So many people were out in the streets — some of them sleeping under the stars, others too scared to close their eyes.

When I arrived at the hotel, the deep fissures in the wall made me wonder whether I, too, might not be better off sleeping in the street.

“This hotel is not safe, ” the auto-rickshaw driver said.

That was all it took. That first night I slept in a dump across from the railway station. But it was a dump without cracks in the walls.

I found a better room on my second day in Ahmedabad, in the Best Western Moti Manor. But I didn’t realize that the rail tracks ran past the back of the building. Every time a train went by, my heart raced at the thought that another aftershock might be rattling the city.

The seismology experts said Gujarat was experiencing aftershocks at the rate of one every hour. It was hard to sleep at night, knowing that the walls could crumble around me at any moment.

It was then that I understood the fear and panic that had gripped this part of the world.

Usually, we find solace in our homes. But here, a two-minute temblor had robbed Gujaratis of that fundamental comfort in life. People regarded their homes not as a place of sanctuary but as a menace, an enemy.

As I visited town after town in Gujarat’s Kutch region, I realized the enormity of what had happened. Entire towns and villages lay flattened. Thousands of people were left out on the fields and streets with nothing left to their names. Out of every pile of rubble wafted the acrid smell of rotting corpses. Men and women wailed openly. Others, shellshocked, grieved in silence. Or didn’t feel at all.

In Anjar, I walked from block to block surrounded by desperate rescue workers. Four hundred dead here. Thirty-two still trapped there. Renu Suri of the Atlanta-based relief and development agency CARE had warned me the death toll is certain to be much higher than reported. She said as many as 100,000 people could have died, but that we may never know with certainty.

I thought of a conversation I’d had a week before the quake with a friend in Calcutta. We agreed that India, the world’s second-most populous country, would go nowhere without family planning. India’s best method of population control, he added, came in the form of natural calamities. We need more cyclones and floods, he said.

I thought his statement gross then. In Anjar, the words became unbearable.

Back in Calcutta, I showed my family a video of Gujarat recorded on my camcorder. As Bhavika Vegad’s face lit up the TV screen, I wondered what she was doing at that moment, 12 days after the quake.

Was she still sleeping in the cold? Was she afraid of entering a cracked building? Had her school reopened? How many of her friends died in the quake?

Bhavika told me her parents had survived. So I knew she was one of the lucky ones.

Yes, Bhavika, I will always remember you. I’ll remember your long black braid bouncing down your back as you ran.

Your smile was the only one I saw in Anjar.

Check out Google today and you’ll see the familiar profile. Round glasses, balding, round head, ears to rival an elephant’s. Walking stick. Dhoti, the white muslin worn by men.

A new four-volume book translated from Gujarati comes out today. I am looking forward to acquiring a copy.

There has always been debate about Gandhi’s non-violence tactics and civil disobedience in India, which ultimately led to freedom for millions from the tyranny of British colonialism but at a great cost. More than a million people died crossing the borders between Islamic Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India. In the end, Gandhi’s critics said, independence was not non-violent, but downright bloody.

Was Gandhi right in trying to beat a master not with physical strength or ammunition but by stronger will — and courage?

Martin Luther King Jr. thought so. He adopted Gandhi’s practices to make America’s civil rights movement.

In my home, Gandhi was a hero. My father, a deep-thinker, a pacifist, revered Gandhi’s teachings, his spirit. I grew up staring at an oversized black and white photo poster of Gandhi in our house. It still hangs on the wall at my flat in Kolkata, one of the few embellishments left there in the years since my parents died.

Gandhi lived a simple life of purity and protest. In the end he was gunned down by a man who failed to understand him. Someone who bore the kind of hate that Gandhi devoted his entire life fighting against.

Whether or not you agreed with Gandhi’s political strategy, you can’t help but admire his everyday practice of ahimsa — an important tenet of the great Eastern religions of Hindusim, Buddhism and Jainism. Do no harm and speak the truth. Always.