In conversation with Indian-origin academic Dr Shruti Kapila at the prestigious University of Cambridge on Monday, he was asked about the death anniversary of his father who was killed in an LTTE suicide bombing during an election rally in Tamil Nadu in May 1991. 

 Kapila, Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at Corpus Christi College, posed the Opposition MP with a Gandhian question of violence and how to live with it at a personal level. 

"The single biggest learning experience of my life was my father's death. There is no bigger experience than that," said Gandhi, after several minutes of pause during which the 51-year-old leader seemed visibly moved. "Now, I can look at it and say the person or the force that killed my father caused me tremendous pain that's correct, as a son I lost my father and that's very painful. But then I can't get away from the fact that the same event also made me learn things that I would never ever have learnt otherwise. So, as long as you are ready to learn, it doesn't matter how nasty or evil people are," the Congress leader said.

 Gandhi went on to relate this to day-to-day politics, adding: "If I turn around and (Prime Minister) Mr (Narendra) Modi attacks me, and I say oh my god he's so vicious, he's attacking me. That's one way of looking at it, and the other way of looking at it great, I could learn something from him, give me some more."

 Asked if loss could be productive, Gandhi reflected on the perils of politics where large energies are at play. "In life you will always, especially if you are in places where large energies are moving, you will always get hurt. If you do what I do, you will get hurt. It's not a possibility, it's a certainty because it's like swimming in an ocean with big waves you are going to go under. When you go under, you learn how to react from it," he said.