Sixty seven years have passed since we lost the greatest
Indian ever. I know him since I started my schooling. He was everywhere.
Currency notes, walls of classrooms and offices, textbooks, as statues on the
road…an omnipresent character with no hair and glamour. As a kid, I assumed he
was a poor villager who did not have education or even money to buy clothes. I
thought he was the oldest freedom fighter and that’s why he is called the
father of the nation. I just knew that everyone respected him and spoke about
him with great reverence. Anyway, I loved him for some other reason. He looked
like a perfect grandpa with a toothless smile. Yes, my Bapuji.
Later when I came to know that he was a barrister, I was seriously proud. I still remember the first time when I watched the movie “Gandhi”. The one scene which I would never forget, is when Gandhi was thrown out of the train with his luggage. That was the moment! Which changed the course of history of a man and a nation. It was later described as the ‘moment of truth’ by Mahatma himself. I slowly started to understand the transition of this barrister in suit to an ordinary man wearing khadi. This amazing transition was full of sacrifices. He sacrificed everything that a normal man would hesitate to. And that’s what makes him Mahatma.
Gandhiji unlike many others, did not focus on transforming others. He worked on himself and demonstrated how world changes when the individual changes. As one of my Professors said “He believed in something, he thought the same thing, he spoke the same thing, and he did the same thing.” This is a very hard thing to do. Which is exactly why the modern day politicians find it impossible to emulate him! Unfortunately, many Indians are busy debating his greatness. And some of them are even busy installing statues of Godse (Gandhi’s assassin) and worshipping him. But this reiterates the legacy Gandhiji has left behind. He never imposed his ideology on anyone. Never did he fight people who objected his ideals.
Gandhiji is not a person anymore. By the time he was assassinated, he had transformed himself into an indestructible idea. Last year, a Gandhi statue was unveiled in London’s Parliament Square. It is a beautiful irony that his statue is placed near to that of Winston Churchill. The man who called him “naked fakir” and made this terrible retort during the Bengal famine “If food is scarce, why isn't Gandhi dead yet?”
The mortal Gandhi was a powerful man. The immortal Gandhi is even more powerful.
