Skip to main content

How to fight like Gandhi

 


The book I’m now reading is Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express. [Waiting in line next is Rutger Bregman’s Hopeful History of Humankind, suggested by blogger-friend Yamini MacLean.] Weiner has taken pretty much of my time already. An attack of Covid-19 kept me in bed for nearly a week and I couldn’t read anything serious, much as I longed to. Moreover, you can’t just skim through Weiner in spite of his apparently light style. The lightness is only apparent. He demands serious reading.

The book is a collection of essays on philosophers from Marcus Aurelius to Simone de Beauvoir. I loved each one of them. Each one begins with a title How to… ‘How to wonder like Socrates,’ for example. ‘How to fight like Gandhi’ lies exactly in the centre of the book, 8th out of 14 chapters. Appropriate place, I thought. Gandhi deserves the centre-stage especially these days when his country is driven by the opposite of all that he stood for, lived for, and died for.

Gandhi was a fighter. Injustice of any kind aroused his indignation. He wouldn’t let it pass. He would look at it with his penetrating eyes. Even the mighty British empire couldn’t withstand the power of that look. That was the Gandhian way of fighting.

It was the power of truth that drove Gandhian fights. The power of personal convictions. Gandhi didn’t need any other power. Not political power. Not the power of weapons. Or violence.

Violence isn’t any power anyway. Violence is cowardice, Gandhi said again and again. “All violence represents a failure of imagination,” as Weiner interprets Gandhi. Violence is the easiest, most unimaginative, and even the laziest solution to problems. It’s so easy to strike down your enemy if you possess the strength for that. Any brute can do that. The animals do that, in fact. But to look into the eyes of your enemy, to understand what he is trying to say, understand his differences – that requires a lot of things like patience and imagination. Gandhi demanded that patience and imagination from his followers. His was a superior way.

By an ironic and cruel twist of fate, Gandhi’s nation today stands at the wrong end of the continuum that stretches from violence to nonviolence, from truth to falsehood.

Gandhi wouldn’t ever have questioned conflicts. Conflicts are natural. Without them, there wouldn’t be any life. Surrender to the rival is not Gandhi’s way. Nor is compromise. Surrender and compromise belong to cowards. We should fight where a good fight is required. The evil has to be resisted. But how?

The means are as important as the ends, Gandhi said. You can’t use falsehood merely to win the war at hand. The bulk of falsehood that dominates current Indian polity would have been Gandhi’s primary rival had he been living today. Rival, I said. Not enemy. Gandhi had no enemies, as Weiner points out. Only rivals who need to be shown the right lights. That was Gandhi’s way of fighting: show the right light.

That light has been replaced today by a resplendence whose brightness blinds and deafens us at once. We need to relearn how to fight like Gandhi.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Hear! Hear! (oh, that they would hear...) A quote I used recently fits this perfectly. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." (Isaac Asimov.)

    Hope you are continuing to strengthen and heal. I was unfamiliar with The Socrates Express - added to my growing wishlist now!!! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm quite fine now. Already up, I'll be running soon.

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, friend. I must acknowledge my debt to eminent writers from whom I steal the big ideas.

      Delete
    2. Encore over and over again, friend :))

      Delete
  3. It is a blessing to have a blogger like you! So many questions of mine are answered by you like an agent of the Divine force in my life. Probably in many others' life too! Thank you for the book review and this wonderful write up. Two questions about non violence and rivalry in the battle for truth have been clarified now. How thankful I am! I think my gratitude is Ineffable many a times like this. It is a bliss and joy to read your writings, dear sir!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear Tomichan,

    Hope you're feeling better and stronger now.

    Thank you for writing this post. If only people in power chose the Gandhian way (no enemies, only rivals), we'd be citizens of a very different world today.

    Stay healthy.

    Arti

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure . The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay. War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviabl...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...