S In other words, don't threaten them or confront them because here is a Truism: "They will anyway fail". It won't matter, if in the process of failing, they would grab your own livelihood and rape you. Because if they did, they will anyway fail eventually, and what are you but a speck of dust that God can take away whenever he wants, eh? and I, the self-important thatha speak all this with my flowery language because that is how they won't get to me. Because, I the self-important thatha, sat at the TOP of the PYRAMID and am a PACIFIST. They LOVE me. They make statues of me all over the place. you see? 
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Radhika Rammohan I try not to get triggered into discussions on Facebook, but this time I succumb. You can choose not to take comfort in Gandhi's above words, as processes all round seem to lead inexorably to a hopeless situation. However, I am not seeing in your comment so much of despair in these realities, as disdain for the speaker. Do you actually believe that we are anything but "a speck of dust...."? Do you believe that he was never beaten or abused? Do you believe that he was born a 'thatha' and people made his statues during his lifetime? I don't actually have such deep faith as he did but it's not very useful for me to deflect that issue and instead make it about his self-importance or floweriness. He lived and died in faith and I will be left with neither faith nor courage.
Aparna Krishnan If we could reduce ourselves to possessing as little as he did, if we could stake our lives and that of our families as he did - then we can start the critique of the things he left undone. Any human being would have made mistakes, and have had errors of perception. So ? Waxing eloquesnt on those seems to be the way to fame these days. Arundathi Roy seems to have written a profound article with the profound title 'Gandhi was not a Mahatma' - saw it yesterday. Anyway the old man with the stick is going thro' a phase of great unpopularity - and i do not think it would bother him, and so i do not let it bother me.
Vepathangudi Ramachandrarao Devika He was the last person to be a pacifist. He always said act, act and act... He never asked for his statue to be put up... His children did not use his name to get anything.... He gave up a lucrative career to work for others... Amazing lack of information and understanding sun son.. I am astonished...
Vepathangudi Ramachandrarao Devika HE WAS NOT A PACIFIST
Aparna Krishnan Sun son, the courage it takes to refuse to raise your hand and allow your head to be broken, is the same courage i see in my village people when in drought they feed every begger who asks at their doorstep. Neither is pacifism. Both are deeply Indian.
Aparna Krishnan The salt satyagraha where nameless people took on the struggle across the country was not pacifism.
Radhika Rammohan Devika - he would not respond with violence no matter the provocation. God help us, that non-violence is understood like this -- of speaking flowery words since one is anyhow privileged! Grr
Aparna Krishnan For simple economic sense, for simple livlihood sense for my village, for environmental answers - I find answers in his, and only his writings. (in that i include kumarappa and the others.). in that long ago age he has the perceptivity to know what violence modernity and indutrilisation would do to all life and to warth itself. Which truth even today, when we are almost past the tipping point, most refuse to see. And there is a deep ecology movement, there is a left movement ... but an integrated picture i cannot find anywhere else - to date.
Aparna Krishnan And his courage, (as also the courage of my village people) came out of a deep spirituality. But religion is the other bad word today - the first being gandhiism.
Aparna Krishnan 'India dare to be worthy of your Gandhi'. Pearl S Buck on his death, " “He was right, he knew he was right, we all knew he was right. The man who killed him knew he was right. However long the follies of the violent continue, they but prove that Gandhi was right. 'Resist to the very end', he said, 'but without violence'. Of violence the world is sick. Oh, India, dare to be worthy of your Gandhi.” "
Aparna Krishnan Romain Rolland, " “Gandhi is not only for India a hero of national history, whose legendary memory will be enshrined in the millennial epoch. -Gandhi has renewed, for all the peoples of the West, the message of their Christ, forgotten or betrayed.” "
Aparna Krishnan And, " “When asked what attribute he most admired in human nature, Mahatma Gandhi replied, simply and immediately, 'Courage'. 'Nonviolence', he said, 'is not to be used ever as the shield of the coward. It is the weapon of the brave.” "
Vepathangudi Ramachandrarao Devika S , you need to read up on Champaran to understand what an activist Gandhi was. It was his first Satyagraha in India after he came back
Prakash Rv Very true.. they will always win... only sometimes it might take more than a lifetime
Aparna Krishnan oh, you will now be called another dreamer who wants the poor to accept injustices meekly. how quickly we can lose our priceless inheritence. and gandhi is one.
Aparna Krishnan religion and gandhi are the pet whipping horses of the present day intellectuals.
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