Monday, October 1, 2007

Celebrating Gandhi

I sometimes teach.

That's when my whim takes me or when i have time from my busy schedule. There's no dearth of students or at least those who pretend to be. They come here to learn different things, mostly vocational courses with as varied courses as driving to electronics to computers to fabric painting and there are about 45 types of courses that we offer...We are a developmental organisation for new comers and this is one part of our work and there are many others which i'll let you know by the by..

Ok. So, on some days i just talk to the students about different things. We share our thoughts and experiences and it is more about me than them. I often do it when i want a third opinion after my own and my own..They, in a way, represent , mini-India, with myriad cultural identities as only our country can give.

Back to my point. Today I had one of those whims. Tomorrow we celebrate 138th year of the Mahatma's birth and United Nation calls it "International Day of Peace and Non-Violence".I thought let's talk to the students about the "father of the nation" and see what they have to say about him. It was raining so most of them were stranded. With little options they came to the conference hall. And well, as soon as i told them what we would be talking about, i saw the most pitiful faces. The usually interested students who loved those talks gave me dark looks and faces that were almost falling off with incredulity which said, "she's absolutely gone nuts" .

I knew this was going to be a long one. One of the girls said she absolutely hated him and when i asked her why, she didn't have one answer. There was another guy who went berserk saying MKG had married many women and the number of children he had would put Bin Laden to shame. Noone knew the exact year of his birth, and according to them he was born in some place in Gujarat, or was it Rajasthan? When i asked them why we called him the father of the nation, someone was intelligent enough to tell me that it was because Shri Rabindranath Thakur had conferred upon him the title of "Baapu" and went on to add that this bit of information was courtesy the movie "Lage Raho Munna Bhai" which he had recently watched.

Dearest Baapu, if you do turn in your grave, i guess it will be surely just because you're laughing too hard. I know you had a great sense of humour. Who can forget those lines? Or do they know about it in the first place? On being asked why he was wearing such a modest attire before his meeting with the British King, he quipped , "The king's wearing enough for both of us". Or the time when he was asked what he thought of western civilisation, he said , " I think it is a good idea". Also when he was in SA, came back one day from his meetings and told Kasturba" You , from today are my kept woman" because the government here needs proof that you are my wife..And the list is endless..

So what has gone wrong?? Why have we forgotten Gandhi? Don't we read about him in every other class? Is it only a holiday? Is it only a day to give a wash to all his statues all over India and garland him and then forget him after the "bhashans' are done with? And some of the students also hated him because it was a "Dry Day". Ok.. I think we should all have seen it coming..

They don't know he is still is a God of the blacks in Africa. They don't know that he almost single handedly, without the bombs and explosives , led the biggest democratic country in Asia to "Democracy'. They don't know what is Gandhianism. They don't know what he meant when he said "show the other cheek". They don't know what was the significance of the "Dandi March". They didn't know what the "charkha" meant to him. They don't know he had followers in Henry Ford, Martin Luther King, Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela and scores of others. They don't know, when two of his most favourite people had let him down in the worst way and were celebrating independence in their respective new born countries, the Mahatma was sitting on a hunger strike in Kolkata, seeing his India breaking up into pieces. They didn't know he was killed by a fundamentalist when he was praying to God for non-violence and solidarity. Oh , wasn't that a non-violent thing to do?

I think, today of all days, we should know our dignity lies in our sovereignty and our culture. When the world is looking at us , we are forgetting our own culture. The "Indianness" of the "charkha" is waiting to be re-recognised. His lessons of Non-violence and truth carry so much of importance today with bombs going off at every other city, the every other day and India leading the list of countries in corruption.The hippest and most happening places in the metros are called MG Road and MG arcade. And I have some serious doubts if the hippest and the happening even know what MG stands for.And let me not start about the morons called politicians. If wearing white kurta and "Gandhi Topi" would have made them as great as "Gandhi" i need not have written this.As for the fundamentalist of all religions and faiths, hope they forget it for one day at least and we do have a "Dry Day" where not a drop of blood is shed in the name of faith and religion.

Thank You Baapu. Can't say for the others, but in my heart, you are truly, deeply loved.