May a million Gandhis bloom

May a million Gandhis bloom

It is never the person. It is the principles and teachings that truly  

While on the threshold  matter. Prioritise wisdom, not intelligence says Suma Varughese

of death, the Buddha  wisely advised his  

principal follower, Ananda, “Be  a lamp unto yourself.” Sadly,  this same person (the Buddha)  has been converted into a god  and worshipped. Statues of him  abound, particularly in Buddhist  countries, and minute vestiges of  his body such as nail parings and  locks of hair are preserved like  precious artefacts in many of the  temples.  

This same fate has overtaken  prophet after prophet. Jesus Christ  is, of course, God Incarnate for  Christians, and Ram and Krishna  too are part of the Indian pantheon.  I hear a temple for Mahatma  Gandhi has recently come up.  The problem is not with deifying  anyone. The problem is that in the  process, we prioritise the person  and not the teachings. And that is  a tragedy because the person’s sole  mission was to have brought us the  teachings. We are short-changing  not only the prophets but ourselves  too when we worship them. For  one thing, the gulf between us  and them becomes so vast as to be  unbridgeable. The teachings are  meant to help us attain their status,  but the pedestal we place them on  defeats the purpose. I suspect that  the hero worship is deliberate. It is  so much easier to worship someone  than it is to aspire to be them.  

Now I am an ardent disciple of  Mahatma Gandhi, but I do not  

have a single portrait of him in  my house. I have a tiny wooden  charkha (spinning wheel)  showpiece someone gave me, and  a line drawing of the back of his  head, with the famous saying, “Be  the change you wish to see in the  world.” For me, it is this quote that  matters, though the line drawing is  beautiful too.  

I idolise his principles, his single minded devotion to the truth and  non-violence, his compassion and  commitment to the poorest of  the poor, and his broad embrace  of differing practices, ideologies,  religions, and ideas. And I am in  love with his ideals and the tools  that were crafted from them that  enabled this country to nobly win  freedom from British rule. His  concepts of satyagraha (truth or  soul force) as the sole weapon in the  freedom struggle and antyodaya  (compassion for the poorest of  the poor and placement of their  welfare first), and his personal  conviction that it is not correct to  own anything unless everybody  has the capacity to own it have  influenced me deeply.  

I am also enamoured of his  economic ideas for India, which  include his concepts of trusteeship  and Panchayati Raj. The former  means that those who have means  beyond their needs hold the  surplus money as a trust for the  rest of society, and the latter hinges  on small village units that combine  

to form consecutively larger  concentric circles that eventually  include the whole country,  thereby linking the smallest with  the largest. I also subscribe to  his concept of political self-rule,  which anticipates that as every  individual becomes more and more  established in self-rule, the state  will eventually atrophy because  it will not be needed. A nation of  self-ruled people will together  create an orderly, law-abiding,  other-focussed society. Each of  these ideals thrills me and inspires  me to strive ever harder to get to  the space where I too will be able  to contribute to their propagation.  Do I love Gandhiji? I revere him,  but I do so because of all that he  has done for this country and  because of the nobility of his  concepts. And I strive every day to  be a little more him and a little less  me. I hope and pray that there will  be many more Gandhis emerging  to take our country forward along  the highest spiritual and ethical  lines. We do not need more  temples for Gandhiji. We need  more Gandhijis.Just like we need  more Rams, Krishnas, Buddhas,  and Jesus Christs. 

Suma Varughese is a thinker,  

writer, and former Editor-in 

Chief of Life Positive. She also  

holds writer’s workshops. Write  

to her at sumavarughese@ 

hotmail.com. 

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