New Delhi, January 30: At 5.17 p.m. Wednesday, leaders of India, a billion-strong country with a trillion dollar economy, stood in silence to pay their tributes to a saintly man who had only a handful of possessions, but commanded millions by just appealing to their conscience.
On the 60th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the lawns of 5, Tees January Marg here were transformed by the presence of security personnel and school children in uniform, with the two-storey bungalow decorated simply with marigold garlands.

The Birla House, as it was known earlier, was the residence of Gandhi for his last 144 days, where he walked his last steps to be felled by an assassin's bullets on Jan 30, 1948. The spot where Gandhi fell down after receiving three bullets, his head in the lap of his grand-niece, is marked by a simple stone memorial with a canopy, covered with petals and flowers of various hues.

Politicians of modern India sat across on the durries, as one by one they first paid their respects at the memorial before taking their seats. The first to arrive was Congress chairperson Sonia Gandhi, followed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Vice-President Mohammad Hamid Ansari and lastly by President Pratibha Patil.

In front of a large banner, over 2,000 school children from 18 schools in the Indian capital raised their voice in unison, singing in Hindi, "Where are the Gandhis in India".

The drone of Buddhist chants was followed by prayers of the Christian, Zoroastrian, Bahai, Jain, Muslim and Hindu faiths. Then, violin maestro L. Subranmaniam and his wife, well-known singer Kavita Krishnamurthy rendered some of the favourite hymns of Bapu, including "Vaishnava jana to" and "Raghupati raghav rajaram". Some of the assembled visitors also softly mouthed the moving words.

Behind a row of religious leaders, a thin white cloth, stretched behind the boundary wall, acted as a canvas for the trees silhouetted against the orange setting sun, as the shadow of a lone security personnel walked up and down during the entire ceremony.

The time of his death (5.17 p.m.) was marked by a two-minute silence, punctuated by the chirping of birds and a distant crackle on a police walkie-talkie.

Then, after a pause, the poignant words of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru played in the background, "Friends and Comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more."

That marked the end of the ceremony, with President Patil immediately leaving the premises. The prime minister and Sonia Gandhi followed suit, but only after waving to the school children, who reciprocated noisily.