Monday, October 01, 2012

Gandhi- Why i want to remember him today

There is no surprise in remembering MK Gandhi today. Its his birth anniversary today and it is only fashionable in intellectual circle to use his name either by name-dropping or using it to effect. However, today is a genuine desire to write about my thoughts about him and my following of him.

I am no Gandhian by far. I am not even a staunch believer in his ideology or ideals. It is not that i have not tried but i have tried and often failed to come close to him but have been attracted to his persona in more ways than one. It is this substance that i want to talk about here.

MK Gandhi was introduced to me , as he is to every Indian child, as the Father of the Nation, The one man who almost single-handed led the nation to independence through the early half the last century. He first struck to me as a Man who did a lot for a nation - one of the biggest nation's in the world even then. This could be done only when someone was larger than the self and had subdued his Ego. This was my first impression of Gandhiji. A little later i learnt the concept of a hero and i discovered that Gandhiji was a hero in the true sense cause he led a scattered nation. A nation scattered by geography  castes, classes, rulers of princely states, religions, faiths and beliefs, cultures, languages and occupations. Gandhiji successfully led this Scattered nation to give us one whole .. a holistic India. HE suddenly appeared inhuman to me. a HERO. He was a modern day Sankaracharya who was omnipresent in every nook and corner of the country.

Gandhiji was becoming larger then life for me when i learnt of the story of the little boy who used to eat a lot of jaggery and Gandhiji being unable to give him advice as he himself was fond of sweets.. the humility and simplicity of Gandhiji was the next feature that made me realize here was a man who retained his simplicity of the heart and yet rose to become Great and a leader in terms of thoughts, people and nations. for the first time in my life i believed that it was possible to be simple and great at the same time.

As i grew up and joined an engineering college , i was introduced to terms like Gandhian Philosophy and Gandhian Economics and for the first time became aware that here was a man who was deeply academic , well read and truly knowledgeable. What made Gandhiji stand out for me was that he was a man of wisdom whose knowledge did not start nor did it end with theory but was always put to use in practice in matters of everyday life as easily as in matters of extraordinary circumstances. Unknowingly Gandhiji had taught me that  if i cant put to use a knowledge i have it is pretty much useless to myself first before it is to anyone else.

As i completed engineering , as fate would have it no way else , i was offered a job 15 kms away from the land of Gandhiji's birth Porbandar. There my weekly outings for sanity and escape from the drudgery of Job were to Porbandar and often to the Home of Gandhiji now converted into a museum  I started buying his books and reading some of them and i was introduced to Gandhi , the author and thinker and researcher in action. I fell in love with his clarity and style. he would introduce a phenomenon and then immediately delve into its many aspects clearly listing each and then belaboring to list the various dimensions in each of the listed aspects. the meticulousness could not be escaped and i fell for it . I had learnt the difference between a thinker and a thought leader. Only later i realized i was only starting to learn that difference. I still hold his meticulousness at writing with crisp clarity and simple language and sentences as my ideal.

The visits to that home and followed by visits to many libraries where his works were stored including visits to the sabarmati and kochrab ashram in Ahmedabad left me amazed - a man with more than ten thousand volumes of meticulously written works that were crisply conceptualized and molded into simple words and sentences of at least three different languages. How on earth could a man who was a public figure like him manage to achieve so much ? Those were the days without computers and rapid technology and yet this achievement is almost unparalleled today.

These are the small nuggets and many such similar nuggets join to create a halo around this person that i see him in a different light and revere him for what he was and what he has helped so many people to be. In a way i ask myself would i write this blog so freely if it were not for him and the independence struggle ?

To sum it up. Even today when someone talks to me about "Äction-research" i acn actualyl think of no better example than  the Father of the Indian Nation - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and in that he taught me why he said "My life is my message."