Wired News: DASSK's friend remembe

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Subject: Wired News:  DASSK's friend remembers...

    NEW DELHI, July 12 (Reuter) - An Indian schoolmate of Aung San Suu Kyi says she
watched the Burmese dissident grow from a shy girl into a confident woman in the years they
spent together in New Delhi.
     "One saw Suu change from a shy, self-effacing schoolgirl to a person with confidence and
definite views," Malvika Karlekar, who has known Suu Kyi since 1959 when they went to high
school together in New Delhi, told Reuters by telephone late on Tuesday.
     "She was a person of tremendous discipline -- it was evident from the way she sat,
conducted herself, spoke and studied," said Karlekar, who later studied with Suu Kyi in New
Delhi's Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College and England's Oxford University.
     "It was at Oxford that she became a person with distict political views," Karlekar said. "I
mean, in school, we were all callow teenagers trying to find a place for ourselves."
     "Suu used to wear a traditional Burmese lungi to LSR, but at Oxford she had switched to
jeans," said Karlekar, who is a sociologist specializing in women's studies.
     Suu Kyi, 50, was freed unexpectedly and unconditionally from almost six years of house
arrest on Monday by the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) on
Monday.
     Karlekar said Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's independence hero and whose mother was
once Burmese ambassador to India, had never expressed overtly political views while at
college.
     "Of course, being her father's daughter, she had distinct political views, but it was
unstated," she said. "It was there. You knew she had a position."
     Suu Kyi's father was General Aung San, who led the country to the brink of independence
from British rule before his assassination in 1947 at the age of 32.
     "Once we tried to get the college (LSR) to keep its gates open for some time longer than
they were open for, or something like that," Karlekar said. "Suu was part of that."
     "And we succeeded and that was a victory -- but that was the extent of our political activity,"
she said with a laugh.
     Karlekar says she last met the 1991 Nobel Peace laureate in 1987 in New Delhi. "Her
husband was in India on a fellowship and Suu was on her way back from a fellowship in
Kyoto," she said.
     Suu Kyi has been married to British academic Michael Aris since 1972. They have two
sons.
  REUTER