Monday, September 11, 2006

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - The Mahatma's fall from grace

A hundred years since Gandhiji launched Satyagraha! and almost sixty years since he brought the British empire to its knees.
And what does the great man mean to India today?
Times of India reports that there are no takers for the courses in Gandhian Studies offered by Universities in India.
Khader wearing/flaunting politicians do not know what the initials M.K. stand for !!!!!!!
A few adcademics i spoke to think he is some/any/all of the following: hypocrite, street smart politician, hoax, irrelevant, intellectually challenged.
Sad. very very sad. How did this happen? This fall from grace?

I still feel he is the greatest man who ever walked the earth.

5 comments:

  1. Well at least now you know how good the academicians you spoke to really are!

    Anybody who comments on Gandhi without making an effort to understand Gandhi is uneducated at best!

    Degrees that people have only give proof of their literarcy. Thoughts reflect their education!

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  2. The movie Lage Raho Munnabhai is a poignant reminder of the state of the nation today...one where we get to the point where we dont know what M.K stands for...Preachy,without seeming to be...and higly entertaing....not the slapsticks that one is used to in Hindi.After ages,am seeing a Hindi movie that was clean,family entertainment & guess what ....had gandhiism thrown in huge dollops,but was beauuuuuuuuuutttttttttiflyy done!Only drawback is you need to know bombaiyya hindi to understand.....but the gist of the movie would get to you even with the subtitles...
    never liked the aging sanjay dutt,but in this movie ....he stole a part of my heart as the do-gooder.
    Arshid Warsi,an underrated actor...was superb!
    No wonder the movie is doing so well abroad& in India.
    Maybe in all our hearts ,there is much more of the Mahatma than we think there is!

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  3. Not very difficult to understand why we choose to forget, ignore, deride, deny him the position he deserves. When the dadagiri of the politician these days makes him unfit to even hold up a candle to this great soul, how can the common man and the academics bow to the greatness of this 'half-naked fakir'. Even if we followed a single one of the principles he held dear the world would have been a better place. We are impatients... We are a people in a hurry to get there... where life is lived on freebies and on the wrongside. Any wonder why we cry foul when we hear the word 'Gandhi' or 'Mahatma'.At least recognise the fact that successive generations of his have chosen not to lead the country and take India as its patriarchal property.

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  4. while i am happy about LO Raho Munnabhai, cant help feeling sad that Gandhiism needs so much of commercialisation, sugarcoating and oversimplification for the gen x to sit up and take notice of it.haven't seen the movie but am quite startled by the hype, tax exemption and the admissions by Indians in a survey conducted by a channel.
    by the way, are you my daughter renu?

    And Bwawani
    dont you think the neglect of Gandhi in the curriculum has something to do with the apathy to that him and what he stood for? With the type of readership you enjoy, why dont you write/generate a debate to create an awareness among the powers that be about including Gandhiism into the curriclum? perhaps that could be one way of restoring some dignity in poitics and public life.

    wonder if there is some agenda in keeping it out of text books!

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  5. What about Jesus ("greatest man who ever...")?

    PS: "By the way, are you my daughter Renu".. :-D

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