Gandhiji in My Mind!
Choicelessness happens when one comes face to face with truth—its singularity and beauty possibly are and will remain ineffable.
Happy Birthday, Bapu!
It has become a ritual for me to set aside this day, October 2, to think about one of the most radical ideas that the human mind has bestowed on us: the idea of non-violence. Today in 1869, Gandhi, the finest votary of non-violence in the last 100 years, was born in India in the city of Porbandar (Gujarat).
Porbandar is also famous for being the city of Sudama, a childhood friend of Krishna. The story of Sudama and Krishna is the story that has cemented the idea of friendship for millennia for millions of Indians (I will come back to Sudama in my future notes).
I think the WORLD has not seen a better friend than Gandhi in the last 100 years! In the coming years, I hope that the world will learn more about one of the closest friends of Gandhi, Dharmanand Kosambi. Without having friends like Kosambi around him, Gandhi probably would not have become who he has been to all of us!
Gandhi has always been in my mind since 2003. I am still looking for a more solid explanation for his insistence on, and his perseverance and his faith in, the idea of non-violence.
What would it take to naturally situate oneself in the idea of non-violence without ignoring injustices happening around us? I am still searching for a more robust epistemic foundation for the idea of non-violence.
Many beautiful things are inexplicable, so I have been living with my yearning for a more solid explanation. I tried reading Martin Luther King Jr. too, yet no resolution. I categorize both of them in the intuitionist bucket. Intuitively, they both could sense the power of non-violence; they both practiced, to the extent that they could, what they preached; and for that, they rightly deserve our praise and respect for who they were.
I asked an academic once if he had heard words like Yama, Niyama, or Ashtavakar after his eloquent take on the importance of Gandhi. He had not, and so have most Indians that I know. I find it hard to believe that many working on Gandhi fail to look for the causes for his persistence with the idea of non-violence. The kind of steadfast resolve with which Gandhi embraced (except for his frustration during the Quit India Movement) non-violence, it is obvious that that was not merely a strategy, but a choiceless act. Choicelessness happens when one comes face to face with truth—its singularity and beauty possibly are and will remain ineffable. No one has better understood this aspect of truth than Gandhi, who repeatedly said: My life is my message!
Growing up, I would always hear of the ‘cheap’ freedom Gandhi bestowed on Indians: We didn’t lose much blood to become free is what I would hear repeatedly. And that was the reason that Indians have not been working to build on the freedom that they gained.
Though volumes have been written on Gandhi and King Jr., there are still dimensions that remain under-explored. The simultaneous emergence of Gandhi and Hitler (and other blood-thirsty mass leaders like Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, etc.) on the world stage points to the need to search for the deeper roots of such heterogeneous responses to oppressive regimes.
Had Gandhi been the first leader from India professing and promoting non-violence, one could have ignored the search for deeper roots and assumed it to be a random phenomenon, but he was not.
Indian soil has been giving rise to people who believed in non-violent polity and conduct: Astavakar, Buddha, Mahavir, Patanjali, Adi Sankaracharya, Kabir, Farid, and many others.
I understood the inanity of violence by coming to terms with the narrow epistemic base for the inference that we make about the ways of the world. We know so little about the world that it is foolhardy to become sure about anything (even about one’s own very self) to the point that you are willing to hurt others to get what you want. Violence, in all likelihood, is a product of certainty! And after realizing this in 2003, I allowed and became a witness to the happenings of the world with almost no desire to intervene in the way it works.
And what mind-blowingly beautiful and awe-inspiring these intervening years have been.
[…TO BE CONTINUED]
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Disclaimer:
Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation, to bring people to talk, discuss, and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn, and I will keep updating this article.
Proud for every Indian that we had Gandi simultaneously India is the only country where ideology of killer of Gandhi is growing instead of Gandhian thought☹️