Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. She was born Sonia Maino in 1946 near Turin, Italy, to a working-class family, and spent her childhood in that region. Her connection with India developed when she met Rajiv Gandhi, the elder son of Indira Gandhi, at a language school in Cambridge, England. They were married in 1968, and Sonia settled in India with her husband. Rajiv worked as a pilot in Indian Airlines, and only his brother Sanjay’s death in 1980, in a plane crash, changed the course of his life. He entered into politics, apparently with immense reluctance, a decision that is said to have made Sonia exceedingly unhappy: she is on record as having said, "For the first time, there was tension between Rajiv and me. I fought like a tigress -- for him, for us and our children, above all, for our freedom." Sonia Gandhi was seldom seen in public, and led a very "private life"; indeed, the 1984 assassination of her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, did comparatively little to make her more visible.