Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was an ordinary man who became extraordinary in quest of a just world. With his strong belief in non-violence and truth, Gandhi set out to find freedom, dignity and respect for his compatriots with peaceful weapons he evolved reading greats like Tolstoy, Thoreau and many more. He named these; Ahimsa or non-violence, Satyagraha or the way of truth and civil disobedience or peaceful protest by disobeying an unjust law.
To use these wisely, we needed a certain amount of education and preparation — not in terms of degrees from universities but in terms of spiritual growth. In his An Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi wrote: “A Satyagrahi obeys the laws of society intelligently and off his own free will, because he considers it to be his second duty to do so. It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge as to which particular rules are good and just which are unjust and iniquitous. Only then does the right accrue to him to the civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances. My error lay in my failure to observe this necessary limitation. I had called on the people to launch upon civil disobedience before they had qualified themselves for it, and this mistake seem to me of Himalayan magnitude.” Have we done anything to rectify his self-professed oversight?
Now as we commemorate his 153rd birth anniversary, in the midst of war, violence, hatred, intolerance, where do we stand in terms of Gandhi’s ideology? For a man lives on only if his ideals survive.
Exploring this issue is an essay by Debraj Mookerjee, who wonders if the man and his values will face complete erasure? Reinforcing this thought is a Manipuri poem by Thangjam Ibopishak, translated by Robin S Ngangom, and a review of a book by Bhaskar Parichha on the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Gandhi. On the other hand is Keith Lyon’s essay on Gandhi’s ‘enduring vision‘ and winding up the prose is Rakhi Dalal’s essay urging us to pursue Gandhi’s vision, titled after the words of a man who did live by Gandhi’s ideals, Martin Luther King, while Aminath Neena gives us an inspirational poem along those lines.
In Quest of Gandhi-ism
Just a Face on Currency Notes? by Debraj Mookerjee explores Gandhi’s relevance and evolution. Click here to read.
Gandhi & the Robot, a poem relooking at Gandhi’s ideology in the present context, written in Manipuri by Thangjam Ibopishak and translated by Robin S Ngangom. Click here to read.
Bhaskar Parichha reviews Why They Killed Gandhi; Unmasking the Ideology and the Conspiracy by Ashok Kumar Pandey. Click here to read.
Re-inforcing Ideals
In the spirit of Gandhi-ism, we have poetry from Aminath Neena, Light a Candle. Click here to read.
In Gandhi — an enduring vision — and those spectacles, Keith Lyons applauds the Mahatma from New Zealand. Click here to read.
‘If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable’, Rakhi Dalal says it all through this quotation of Martin Luther King Jr. Click here to read.
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