Gandhi Jayanti

[Guest guest]

Hari OM!

 

Many can condemn enveloping darkness harshly

How few can spread light around silently!

 

Many rise to abuse when hurt even by a word

How few with bleeding heart can remember only Lord!

 

Many seek truth

How few live truth!

 

Many are illustrious sons of a nation

Only one is called Father of a nation!

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During Gita Satsangs, Gandhiji is often mentioned as an example

of Karma Yogi. Gandhiji had special interest in reciting often

the eighteen verses (55-72)from second chapter of Gita consisting

of " Sthitaprajna lakshanas " - Path of Perfection.

 

On the occasion of Gandhiji's 138 birth anniversary, I would like

to share below words from Encyclopedia Brittanica that touched me.

 

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[source: Encyclopedia Brittanica]

 

Gandhi:

*******

" Never again " was his promise to himself after each escapade.

And he kept his promise. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior,

he concealed a burning passion for self-improvement that led him to

take even the heroes of Hindu mythology, such as Prahlada and

Harishcandra—legendary embodiments of truthfulness and sacrifice—as

living models.

 

What was new was not Gandhi's experience but his reaction. Gandhi

was not the man to nurse a grudge. Thus was born satyagraha

( " devotion to truth " ), a new technique for redressing wrongs

through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting

the adversary without rancour and fighting him without violence.

 

As later events were to show, Gandhi's work did not provide an

enduring solution for the Indian problem in South Africa. What he

did to South Africa was indeed less important than what South

Africa did to him. It had not treated him kindly, but, by drawing

him into the vortex of its racial problem, it had provided him with

the ideal setting in which his peculiar talents could unfold

themselves.

 

South Africa had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel

technique for political action but also transformed him into a

leader of men by freeing him from bonds that make cowards of most

men. " Persons in power, " Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about

Gandhi in the Hibbert Journal in 1918, " should be very careful how

they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure,

nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise, or promotion,

but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is

a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body which you can

always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul. "

 

It was inevitable that Gandhi's role as a political leader should

loom larger in public imagination, but the mainspring of his life

lay in religion, not in politics. And religion for him did not mean

formalism, dogma, ritual, or sectarianism. " What I have been

striving and pining to achieve these thirty years, " he wrote in his

autobiography, " is to see God face to face. " His deepest strivings

were spiritual, but unlike many of his countrymen with such

aspirations, he did not retire to a cave in the Himalayas to

meditate on the Absolute; he carried his cave, as he once said,

within him. For him truth was not something to be discovered in the

privacy of one's personal life; it had to be upheld in the

challenging contexts of social and political life.

 

It is probably too early to judge Gandhi's place in history. He was

the catalyst if not the initiator of three of the major revolutions

of the 20th century: the revolutions against colonialism, racism,

and violence. He wrote copiously; the collected edition of his

writings runs to more than 80 volumes.

 

In recent years Gandhi's name has been invoked by the organizers of

numerous demonstrations and movements, but with a few outstanding

exceptions—such as those of his disciple the land reformer Vinoba

Bhave in India and the black civil rights leader Martin Luther

King, Jr., in the United States—these movements have been a

travesty of the ideas of Gandhi.

 

In a time of deepening crisis in the underdeveloped world, of

social malaise in the affluent societies, of the shadow of

unbridled technology and the precarious peace of nuclear terror, it

seems likely that Gandhi's ideas and techniques will become

increasingly relevant.

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Hari OM!

-Srinivas