A time to turn to Gandhi in a troubled age

Amid the death and destruction wrought by two wars, which have been raging for months and years in two distant parts of the globe, there is one man and his thoughts which stand tall and are worth remembering if we are looking for an end to this mindless annihilation. And he is the Mahatma, whose personality and contributions were so succinctly described by the great scientist Albert Einstein in one sentence: ‘Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon the Earth.’ There are indeed few mortals who have dominated human thought and action as much as Gandhi in the last two centuries. His philosophy of Ahimsa and Satyagraha were adopted by many towering leaders across the globe including Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King with an enormous degree of success. Even as the lathis and bullets rained down on them, countless protesters did not give way in what was an outstanding tribute to the principle of passive resistance propounded by the Mahatma. And it did indeed topple regimes which had no answer to the dogged strength of the human spirit to continue battling till freedom was achieved, whatever may be the cost.

Gandhi functioned in an age, which was no doubt one which saw great calamities befall the human race. The two world wars and the destruction wrought by the nuclear bomb made him write these prophetic words: ‘Has not the atom bomb proved the futility of all violence? And yet we are crazy enough to think we can win Swaraj by breaking a few skulls and destroying property which, after all is said and done, is our own.’’ He was witness to the mass killing of millions as the Allied and Axis forces clashed across Europe and Asia and yet he did not give up faith in the infinite goodness of man. And so he wrote ‘The most practical, most dignified way of going on in this world is to take people at their work, when you have no positive reason to the contrary. I refuse to believe that the tendency of the human nature is always downward”. Seventy six years after he fell to the bullets of an assassin, there are many leaders across the globe who are reaching out to Gandhi for hope and clutching on to his thoughts.

For modern warfare has assumed demoniac dimensions with 41,000 souls wiped out from a tiny stretch of land called Gaza in the space of a year and no end to the war in sight. And in Ukraine where the war with Russia started way back in 2022, the bombs and drones are taking an endless toll of lives and assets. Neither the United Nations, once considered the foremost world body with its diktats no less than sacred, nor super powers like the US, China or Russia, have been able to use their ‘commanding presence’ to bring the warring nations to agree to some kind of truce; and there does not seem to be any likelihood of the guns stopping booming in the near future as the armies involved unleash their deadly arsenal on each other and even do not rule out the nuclear option.

Peace and humaneness are the words any rightthinking individual would fall upon, amid this madness of war and is there anyone who could serve as a more apt icon for them than the Mahatma, whose life and thoughts are an unblemished example of the resolve to prevent hurt and bloodshed at any cost? There are few others who could match Gandhi in his sagacity of thought, which was so aptly summed up by the great poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore who wrote: 'His simplicity of life is child-like, his adherence to truth is unflinching his love for mankind is positive and aggressive.... As India celebrates his birth anniversary today, it is the time to replenish our minds and thoughts with the essence of Gandhian philosophy, which could also offer the world enough clues to steer itself out of these troubled times.