On January 30, 1948 I was a student of class six in a remote village in Odisha. A few months before, the national flag was hoisted in our school by Headmaster to our chanting of ‘Jana Gana Mana’. And now came the news that Gandhiji was no more. We had never seen him in person, but only his pictures. We had made fun of his long “elephant ears”, his quaint grandpa spectacles and the pocket watch hanging from his waist. The news said how the assassin’s bullet felled him and he crashed on the path on his way to a prayer meeting. We returned home weeping as if our own grandpa was dead. We knew he left behind his austere earthly possessions: a spinning wheel, his wooden sandals, spectacles but more importantly, his dreams. As I grew older, I read and understood a little more of him and the dreams he had for India and all of humankind. He wanted his life to be an open book and an ongoing experiment with truth. I came to realise how intensively he was human, one who replied to the queries of a Harijan girl with the same meticulousness as he did to the Governor General. When Tagore wrote to him of human freedom, of men as birds under the Indian sky, his anguished reply, published in Young India on October 15, 1921, was ‘I have had the pain of watching birds, who, for want of strength, could not be coaxed even to flutter their wings. I have found it impossible to soothe the suffering with a song from Kabir.’ Gandhiji’s favourite bhajan described a Vaishnav as one who knew others’ pain and made it his own. He had made the pain of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and everyone else his own. He could inspire Bengal Governor Suhrawardy, an ardent follower of Jinnah’s ideology, to be with him at Calcutta to appeal to both Hindus and Muslims before he left for Noakhali. The desire to live beyond hundred years had slowly ebbed out of him with the bloodbath and the Hindu-Muslim divide, he confided to Mahadev Desai. Once I visited his Kausani ashram where he wrote the Anashakta Yoga. I realised he had been moved by the mighty Himalayas and had become an inspiration for us, in his courage, his steadfast love for entire humanity and his apparent obtuseness which sometimes exasperated both Nehru and Patel. But greatness and courage consists in admitting one’s mistakes and he had said, ‘I would not have freedom which does not permit me to make mistakes’. He knew that the rich should live a little less luxuriously so that the poor can just live. He emphasised that the world had enough for everybody’s need but not for everybody’s greed. When we see escalating violence all around, true non-violence as Gandhiji understood it and advocated is more than ever a crying need. Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs researches non-violence as a political concept. There is also a need to revive Gandhiji’s concept of trusteeship, non-possession and seeing the world as our only ‘home’. He stressed on intergenerational equity, that the world’s wealth is not merely for us, but also for succeeding generations. Gandhiji was a difficult person, and all great men are perceived to be so. But his life’s message, shorn of all scholarship, was simple -- that we lead a simple life. We should work toward simplicity despite the fact that it is difficult to lead such a life and we need to understand all its implications.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 13:09:17 +0000