Skip to main content

A century after Gandhi

 Mahatma Gandhi belonged to the 20th century. He was arguably the saint of that century. 76 years ago, on this very day - 30 Jan - he was assassinated brutally by a misguided and perverted ideology which, unfortunately, has laid siege to contemporary India, thereby assassinating the spirit of Gandhi again and again. 

Allow me to present a few images here on this death anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. These images have little to do with Gandhi himself. But they have much to do with what he was trying to teach the world about things such as development without heart, greed without limit, craze for power and self-aggrandizement, political chicanery...

The rich and powerful have all the goodies and buddies. The poor are plundered of everything, even their food. When a few choose to live life kingsize, the majority get trampled under their boots. [The images may have little to do with Gandhi directly, as I've already said. Nor with India per se.]



Two faces of religion in the Mahatma's Land. The new devotee and the new High Priest. 



The above is the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning picture taken by journalist Kevin Carter. A starving child in strife-ridden Sudan. Carter committed suicide later. "I'm really, really sorry," his suicide note lamented. 

We all have reasons too many to be sorry today... Let us, at least, keep alive the memory of the Mahatma in our hearts. Maybe, we can still light a candle while the darkness is engulfing us. 

And let me end with just two more images. 







Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 30, 2024 at 6:30 AM

    Hari Om
    That last is offensive, heh na? Not a patch, no, not even a thread resembling the original. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz A.January 30, 2024 at 6:39 AM

    You'd think we would have been able to figure out how to fix the things he pointed out. Sadly, those in power don't want those things fixed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeJanuary 30, 2024 at 7:19 AM

    Doing what he loves doing best, spinning tales to his devotees!

    ReplyDelete
  4. TheMoon'sBOYFRIENDJanuary 30, 2024 at 8:47 AM

    I feel bad for Kevin, to let all that pain rein on himself. People critiqued about him not helping the kid, well where these people before and it wasn't his fault for the world being like this.


    Of course a part of us will feel bad for the kid and for him leaving, he was only human, he may not have realized the gravity of things that would rile him down.

    ReplyDelete
  5. CareenaJanuary 30, 2024 at 11:00 AM

    The kevin Carter image is haunting and the aftermath of it even more so. But the last image speaks volume. The PM looks like he's having trouble sitting in that position, rightly so, its not easy to sit where the Mahatma did...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousFebruary 5, 2024 at 9:31 PM

      Kevin wasn't at fault, he had some mistakes of his own but the main issue was that He wasn't allowed to touch anything foreign there as it might bring in any diseases, He indeed did shooed away the eagle and the food centre wasn't quite far, later sources suggest it was actually a bit and he indeed did survive, The fault of Kevin was that he didn't inform authorities about the child crawling and waited for 10-20minutes keeping the child in vulnerable position just to get that perfect shot , But the photo did bring out much donation and raised issues of incoming threat to other countries ,

      Delete
  6. marietta pereiraJanuary 31, 2024 at 2:24 PM

    A sorry state of affairs indeed which seems to be getting worse with each passing day. The image of the starving child tells it all.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 3, 2024 at 8:47 PM

    A disturbing post... With no immediate answers .

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more