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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. Yamini MacLeanJuly 19, 2021 at 6:27 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2021 at 8:37 PM

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

      Delete
  2. DawnanddewJuly 20, 2021 at 10:08 AM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 20, 2021 at 10:16 AM

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

      Delete
    2. DawnanddewJuly 20, 2021 at 2:18 PM

      Encore over and over again, friend :))

      Delete
  3. DawnanddewJuly 20, 2021 at 10:14 AM

    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. ArtiJuly 21, 2021 at 10:12 AM

    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

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