(via
Rama Subramanian
' s post and thread.)"at different times i have considered that Gandhi Jayanthi ought not to be a holiday. it is an insult and Gandhiji wouldn't have wanted it that way. I am happy either by mistake or through deliberate choice one state has finally done this. ... when he has stopped meaning much to the larger society 364 days, the 1 day tamasha is an insult "
Me - yes, i keep feeling he's almost unpolular. at least it sounds a little like that here, on the internet world. And anyway 'simplicity' and 'austerity' are almost bad words today !
Rama Subramanian - ...i was called to inaugurate an 'honesty shop' by one of the socially active groups a couple of years ago in a corporation school in the city. this is some kind of a shop where they have all that the kids need, but, there are no supervisors. so, kids have to put the appropriate money in the box and take what they want...i started to ask the children whom they thought were the most corrupt people in the society. the answers were, 'policemen', 'doctors', 'lawyers'! i told them that someone said the same thing almost 100 years ago about doctors and lawyers and asked them whether they knew who could that be. a little girl, perhaps class 6, put up her hand and said, 'Gandhi?', i asked her how she guessed and she said, 'only he could have said something as sensible'! i asked her if she had read him, she said, 'no'! Gandhi for me still resonates closely to the idea of truth in this land, among children, among farmers (i have done another exercise once with farmer leaders in which similar responses emanated) and the aam aadmi of this country. these people work anyway on all holidays, so, make it a non-holiday
Me - very interesting. and many intellectuals split hairs, and even call him cunning and worse. but my village people do not really engage with the Gandhi idea much - its not much in their minds. Gandhi has deeper roots in TN than Rayalseema ?
Rama Subramanian - ...once in a farmer's meeting on 'taking initiatives and leadership' in community, i had asked them to list down people whom they considered as leaders and put it away. later through another exercise, i asked them to list down what according to them were 'leadership qualities'. this was in a village in nagapattinam, thanks to Subhashini Sridhar...after they listed and agreed on this - there were about 40 of them in the room and they came up with a list of more than 20 qualities of a leader...they took each one of the 'leaders' they had listed earlier and analyzed them using the newly developed qualities, and the only leader who stood up to all of these qualities was Gandhi...believe me, i was not leading them, just facilitating their own thought process...
Intellectuals have problems with Gandhi, almost all educated people have probelms with gandhi depending on what form of exposure and education they have. most of them who 'object' because it is politically correct to do so, and the political correctness can come from dalit, leftist, rightist, rights based, feminist and many such identities that our people need to hold aloft in giving their opinion on anything.
In fact, i have a method, whenever i am asked to talk about gandhi to kids, i ask them what they think of him. believe me, the 'upper class' school kids all immediate object and talk about why they hate him while the 'lower strata' school kids don't have much idea and think he must have been a decent bloke after all it is not about TN or rajalseema...i think gandhi is an idea, a metaphor for truth, purity, that which is correct, dharma (as you often cite)...that which is correct and asserted even by the poor and vulnerable.if you ask people about the person gandhi, most of our people will not know and there is no need. like ramayana, gandhi katha is different in different parts of india and that is the way we are...our narrative traditions are not about the myth as much as about ourselves, our journeys towards what we consider is the truth. dharampalji used to maintain that if you go by the local myths across india, rama and lakshmana visited most parts of india during their vanavas...it is not that it is 'historical' fact or not. that is the problem with the professors, they split hair about whether you can dredge and destroy one marine eco system because rama didn't go there and can avoid the same elsewhere because he did go there to cross the sea. he went everywhere...once a monk told me that, the idea of 'pure' gangajal is also a metaphor as according to the mantra that they chant, you can invoke the ganga anywhere, even in your kitchen water....the purity is in conserving, caring, safeguarding and not in carrying something for several hundred / thousand kilometers like some mule or something. during 'maha maham' in kumbakonam, it is said that on that one day, the tank water become as pure as 'ganga' same with every pushkar in this country in every part...so also for people, when i assert truth, i am gandhi, or atleast closer to him, when i don't i am myself, my own small self with limitaitons and weaknesses...that is what gandhi means to people and that is what i always feel will hold him much more closer to our ordinary folks than the 'objective', 'scholarly' intellectuals.
Me - Yes, fits with the Indian thinking as I have seen it. Where everyone and everything becomes simply a focal point on which to place our value system - which is larger than the present life, larger tgan our sortcomings, and larger than the shortcoings of our gods and our heroes. Only the intellectuals as you say are caught up in a limited way of viewing, and there it is their loss as they lose the wood for the trees. In this forum itself as people have time and again pointed out gandhi''s failures. I have tried to assert that his failures are irrelevent, as it is the idea that he stood for that matters. He himself also strived for those ideas, and he would be the first to accept the failures himself.
Rama Subramanian - Somehow our scholars have lost the capacity to relate to the issues of the masses, it is to do with the 'knowledge' behaviour I think. Of you know more, I.e., educated you are supposed to behave us a certain manner... So, we are preoccupied with dissecting a dead past and presenting it our people who have no use for it, while the shaping of future needs strengthening our people and igniting their imagination for a better world, this our scholars don't seem to be able to do
Me - the more educated, the more westernised one's notions, and the more disassociated from the people. (and thereby from gandhi who had actually finally dropped his western preconditionings and developed the perspective of the people.)
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