GANDHI

Having felt wonderful being told in a children’s column that Beethoven, Bach, Mozart etc (and anyone who wishes to write ought to get) settled down to their jobs with as much regularity and (zero) inspiration as an accountant to his figures, and having forgotten much of what appealed to me as I leafed through the pages of the book 'THE LIFE OF MAHATMA GANDHI' by Louis fisher, I hurry up to etch the few things that are luckily still in the clutches of my highly volatile memory......

THE DEFINITION: Ill borrow from the author for 2 reasons: 1.Its hard and painstaking to find other words. 2. Its not necessary (it’s a very good definition). And I think twice for some other reason: its dangerously hackneyed and highly slightable. And I proceed: “Truth, Non-violence and Means above End.”

THE IMAGE: There is a funny story that I believe serves towards explaining the image of the Mahatma in the masses. It was a rainy day and Gandhi was traveling in a mushy Indian pre-independence train. The train stopped at a station. Two rainsoaked boys suddenly started fireflying on Gandhi’s window; they were jumping on the otherside to catch a glimpse of the ‘Great Gandhi’ only barely managing to succeed and they were shouting “Gandhi Gandhi Gandhi”. Now Louis Fischer turned to Gandhi and asked “What do u mean to those two boys (jumping incessantly in the equally stubborn rain just to look at u)?”. And Gandhi replied with admirable sagacious humor; he stuck his two thumbs to his temples and said “a horned human; a spectacle”! That, I believe very well explains how Gandhi has been going down in the psyches of everybody who heard his name ever since. So much for a man who is now remembered only in gross jokes, fun smses, boring sermons and lifeless school-texts. But I guess strangely, almost everyone is opinionated about him: a hypocrite, an independence delayer, an unmanly fool, or just some antique piece of greatness- a joke. The personality was probably never really largely understood in the public then and now; people were probably attracted to his personality when he was alive; they loved him without bothering about knowing anything else (and why should they?).
Now, he’s dead, we don’t have a means of direct affinity; and are left with the-loving-after-learning way. Somehow the respect died and the name survived.


THE DISTINGUISHING FACTOR:
One thing that aloofs Gandhi from all other greats my mental premises could include till now is this:
Every other great man was a product of his greatness; Gandhi produced his greatness.
Every other great man was essentially revolving round his gift; He was battered hither and thither like a withered leaf on its way to the ground by the products of his gifts and the passions surrounding them; There was a particular quality that he was an epitome of and that defined him; His life was a passive, spontaneous , intrinsic, logical proceeding of the unraveling of the extraordinary quality that he possessed and lived out; He did not manipulate his body or mind towards his greatness; He reacted with his greatness. The virtue in his being drove the man.

But it was different with Gandhi. He was not born with, guided, driven or impassionate by a single definitive quality. He was very objective of what he considered virtuous. He objectively manipulated his being (his body and mind) to conduct themselves and function in a manner he deemed virtuous; as if he stayed outside his body.

Bluntly, for others, greatness was a reaction of an intrinsic virtue;
For Gandhi, it was all about the pursuit of an extrinsic virtue.


THE FILTHY DOGMA:
One stunningly admirable quality of this personality was that (personally,) there were no dogmas or theories or isms attached. Everything we might be tempted to classify as 'a gandhian dogma' is merely a tool he invented to combat specific opponents.

Generally what happens is this: A man, when incidentally or deliberately stumbles upon a truth, and consequently gets overwhelmed with beauty, victory, elation,fulfilment and happiness that back the validity of this 'moment of glory', draws corollaries, proceedings, theories and conclusions from it and all this towards equipping himself with a dogma for all future encounters. But somehow, it didn’t happen with Gandhi; he never developed for himself a 'tool of thought'.

He treated and answered each question distinctively 'without a map' as the author would have it.
An encounter was not - a dogma reacting; a thinking process reacting; a past experience reacting; a quality reacting.....nothing, nothing.....just nothingness reacting!
As if something called 'purity' entered time and space and fittingly shot out distinctive ripples at distinctive points in the journey.
Just imagine 'truth' reacting to things.............



IN DEFENCE OF DISCREPANCIES:
Yes, there were on-ur-face-blotches. Inconsistencies existed. And to the end of, and as a biased means glamorizing this phenomenon, id like to say that they were only technical. The faults emanated from the disciplinary regulations he devised and imposed on himself and his surroundings to tune him into our 'Mahatma'. His mind sometimes faltered in making a perfect sanction.

Some areas where his opinion was inconsistent were: the cast system: initially he maintained they were indispensable to Hinduism, afterwards he said 'they were a blot on Hinduism'; inter-caste/religious marriages: was against and later for them; celibacy and sexless marriage: He grew less stringent in time; etc

On the brighter side, he never hesitated to accept and make public his mistakes (sometimes gigantically embarrassing) - because he wanted and exuded truth, and nothing less; and keeping back anything was as hideous an act as lying itself! -amazing!
And in this context, it’s worth quoting him on errors and freedom: "freedom is not complete without the freedom to err" - as down to earth and simple as that!


THE FEEBLE WOMAN: There is a general feebleness attached to his phenomenon by hasty common opinion and the rationalized approach of the intelligentsia in words like “what, if not the way of the woman, is it to attain a goal by self-suffering & restraint”.

An analogy is drawn between a wife’s act of courting love and compliance by ‘not-eating’,’ not-talking’, ‘self suffering’ etc, until he comes , surrenders, consoles and loves. But a similarity can also be drawn to Jesus’ ”show-the-other-cheek”, and all such widely celebrated theories. Ultimate comparison of this with the ways of violence, aggressive pay-back, just retribution, how ever logically sound they might be, suggests sublimation of the former. They show higher levels of human evolution. It has to be admitted they are feminine………..may be nature is a lady.



THE GROUND BREAKING FAST:
It took me a long time to come to terms with the 'Gandhi fast'. He fasted every time he needed people to do (or stop doing) something. The more I tried to take it to the heights of sublimity having bowed to my intuition, the more I found myself dragging it to the abysses of disdainful mediocrity. A friend of mine fasted till his father bought him a new motorcycle. I couldn’t see the difference....
And one fine day, I succeeded. It was indeed different. It’s like Christ’s crucifixion. A bit like the sages of the old who took upon their bodies the consequences of their brethrens' sins. But it wasn’t penance. It was a battle; Gandhi's body was the battlefield. When people went well past the reach of rational reprimanding, when they couldn’t see what they were actually doing, the only way possibly out was to bring them to direct perception of the process of action and effect(perhaps symbolically here). In the immense blur, they needed a magical mirror to showcase them and their opponent in combat; a barometer to indicate the levels of their victory, when they were winning and when they were losing. When they didn’t quite precisely know what they were doing, it was necessary that they be made to know; and they probably wanted it too. The mirror has to be up there in the skies for everyone to see; the barometer be somewhere immediately accessible for instant analysis; it had to be Gandhi- a man who all could identify with, who people could love; a man who lifted himself to such stature so as to qualify to represent humanity, more precisely, the battle field for the forces of humanity, for the forces of good and evil.
When Gandhi declares a fast, he declares a battle. He becomes the battle-site and impels all humanity to come and war, to react. He brings in the obscure enemy. He brings them face-to-face with their enemy and puts an end to their fisting the air and breaking their own homes with rage for an invisible opponent.

When Gandhi declared a fast against the Hindu-Muslim fight, the message was not something like "stop your silly fight or else ill kill myself". The deterrent was not the fear of a loved ones death. The message was something like "come see what you are doing, come see who you are really fighting, see that its not your brother that your fighting, its the demon of hatred, of intolerance; lets not have any pretences, any misgivings; come see how you are terribly failing, how your loosing the battle without even striking a single blow.....come, come fight!".
If Gandhi dies, human virtue dies; goodness dies at the hands of evil; low kills high; the Samaritan dies at the feet of depravity.whatever! If and when people reacted, it was not really because they feared Gandhi's life, it was because they feared losing something which they, as anybody (however brutal), need for existing, something they so dearly value: their (human) capacity for good and the sublime.

THE FATHER: I don’t want to sound like a fool but I do vividly remember my body conducting a brief current of a novel emotion in the end; I felt for him, personally; I felt for a father.

It was not about his way of life, his intelligence, his achievements, and his greatness- not the independence either. He somehow connects to people passionately on personal levels. It’s a feeling of ‘my ness’. It’s like loving your country even as you admire America; it’s like how my friend loves his mother even when he’d shout ‘Indira’ when someone hints ‘woman?’ It’s intrinsic; it’s an affinity to the material one is made up of; an extreme epitome of all that is distinctive of you; about like-attracts like; and it’s very Indian.

In his own words, he attacked peoples’ hearts; he doesn’t bother about the brains. Even with the intelligentsia, he would say,” as a rule, reason follows feeling”, it was all about penetrating the heart sufficiently to convince their reason. And somehow still, the frail old dead man manages to work his spells.