One of the people that I have never had a chance to ever meet and still be heavily intrigued and and influenced by is Gandhi. As a child, I remember being asked to write up an essay on him for my English course. In fact there used to be a book, maybe it still comes out, which had all the generic essays and one of them was on Gandhi. It started with when he was born, his parents, a little bit about his work and then his death - maybe a page or two in all. As a ritual, I mugged that up to vomit it out verbatim in the exam. The perception in my head was - nice guy, cool stuff, but I need to get 10/10 on the exam.

Then that perception of Gandhi changed from a nice guy to that of a traitor when my history teacher, who seemed so opposed to the ideas and work of Gandhi that he might himself have pulled the trigger, told us all the ‘evil’ that Gandhi did. I did not quite understand that abhorrence but it seemed cool to reject Gandhi as it was the common sentiment in the class. After all you don’t want to be the odd chap in the class and have a soft corner for someone who professed forgiveness.(You know how teenage boys are eager to put people in their place with a show of strength.)

But having read whatever my history book had to offer, something really flummoxed me. How on earth could someone come up with the idea that the way to deal with violence is through non-violence. I mean leave aside the whole idea of its feasibility and its practical usefulness - the question that really caught my attention was what could lead someone to come up with such a hypothesis in the first place? The only reasonable response to someone slapping you is to either slap him back or report him to law. But how come this guy came up with a fundamentally different and a non-intuitive idea?

It was in search of an answer to this question, I started reading a bit on him. When I paged through his autobiography, My Experiments With Truth, I was thoroughly impressed with the candour in it - I mean you need certain degree of strength to lay down your weaknesses that way - the section where he talks about how he was caught in the grips of lust when he left his sick father to rush to his newly wedded wife while his father breathed his last. The other thing that caught my attention was some of the dilemmas he faced. He relates an episode about the time when his brother asked him to put in a favour with the local British official and the embarrassment he felt after having given it a shot. This and a few other conundrums he faced when his sense of morality clashed with the practical expectations of the people around him somehow resonated strongly with me. As a teenager when I read that book, it was comforting to see that someone had already struggled with what to most people seem like trivial decisions.

My next book on him was Graham Turner’s Catching up with Gandhi. It has been a long time since I read that one - but I remember it being beautifully written - presenting not only the greatness and the virtues of the man but also his misgivings. The time when he asked Kasturba to leave after she refused to agree to his wish of cleaning the toilets herself. Perhaps, he was trying to set an example and get rid of the mindset that resulted in the flourishing of untouchability; but it was interesting to see him struggle - trying to uphold what he considered right but failing to be kind and accepting of her wife’s values at that point. Where do you draw the line? Do you allow the people closest to you continue to do what you consider wrong? How could you then ask others to change ? Isn’t there a danger of self-righteousness?

The other interesting read was Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi before India. This was almost like a treatise when compared to the other books and thoroughly interesting. I read it at a time in life when I was completely and fully lost. It was comforting being able to converse with Gandhi through Guha’s work - understand some of the hard life choices and trade-offs he made - for an introverted, obedient young chap how torn he would have been to leave behind his mother after his father’s death and sail across the seas to London; how about the culture shock that London at that time offered him? and the incomprehensible pain he must have felt when he came back to India and discovered that his mother was no more and he could not now ever tell her that he kept his promises to her. Then there were choices he had to make in his attempt to match his idealism with his actions - whether it was correct for him to recommend his own son for a scholarship or choose the most eligible child in the community? Should he charge the people whom he was representing in South Africa for his time? If not, was it justified to deny his wife and children the material pleasures of the world?

From what began an attempt in trying to understand the reason for Gandhi’s focus on non-violence, love and truth, Gandhi, for me, has gone from being ‘good guy, cool stuff’ to being sort of a friend and a mentor - whom I turn to now and then - sometimes to question some of his beliefs and other times to get more perspective on certain things that might be perplexing me at that time. You know how folks that are really close to us insist on some of the things that they truly believe in and want us to imbibe them; in case of Gandhi I think those would have been adherence to truth and relentless action. Given his inclination to all things spiritual, he could have so easily given up all the worldly matters. Instead he sought his perfection through his actions in the real world. Its admirable how relentlessly he had worked on a large range of issues and how much he sought to live out his ideals and morals in the real world.

I wish I would have been alive at his time, so that I could directly question him, challenge his ideas and hear his stories. One of qualities that I admire every time when I read an account on him was his openness to criticism, willingness to discuss contradictory ideas and adopt them if they made sense - so I think he would have been open to my nagging :) It would have been so cool ! But since that’s not an option, I will continue to converse with him through books

The other time when I visited Birla Bhavan in Delhi, I came across these lines which apparently he used during his prayer sessions:

“Lead me from untruth to truth, From darkness to light, From death to immortality”

I think these lines also best summarise his complete life and I can only hope the same for me.

PS: In fact there is a new book on him by Guha - Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948. If someone here is in a gifting mode- you know what to send to my address :)