Gandhigiri is not possible without Gandhi.

I laughed through ‘Lage raho Munna bhai’, then a few days later I watched it again. I feel that this movie is simply superb, I can imagine Mahatma Gandhi being used as a icon in a movie on social issues (Water), or patriotism or biography (Gandhi, Gandhi My Father, The making of a mahatma) but I had never imagined that Mahatma Gandhi could be a character in a comedy movie. The writer/directory did a superb job of using Gandhi’s principle in a relevant comedy situation, the coining of the word Gandhigiri was a stroke of genius, it now feels as if the term is so natural, why didn’t anyone use it before. Ofcourse it is Munna and Circuit that provide the comedy. And yet Mahatma Gandhi does not loose one iota of respect, If anything it simply reveals how much Gandhi’s principles and Gandhi himself are a part of our lives and history and how much Gandhi’s principles have shaped the thought process of India. But I digress.

After ‘Lage Raho’ Gandhi became a cool dude. Gandhigiri became a fad, people started talking about resurgence of Gandhi’s principles. The elders (Gandhians) started feeling that the GenX was probably realizing the importance of Gandhi and his principles. Gandhians started believing that all of India’s problems can be sovled using Gandhian principles. But they all forget that Gandhigiri is not possible without Gandhi. I say this because, if today an elder were to go to a government office and start taking off his cloths to pay for a bribe, the police would put him in a mental asylum or just throw him out. If a girl refused to marry a boy because he was disrespectfull to a waiter, she would be called a fool by her own family and forced to marry him.

I feel that Gandhi is completely misunderstood. We take his principles too literally. You can’t simply say we will follow the path non-violence and non-cooperation and hope for things to sort them selves out. Gandhi did not walk all the way from Sabarmati to Dandi for nothing, he chose an issue, salt, that cut across cast, class, religion, region… and then did not take a train, which would have been faster, but walked around 240 miles, that took him 23 days, in the process he caught the eye of everyone in every village. town, city that he passed through, gathering people as he passed through. There was foriegn and domestic media. Just about every one in the world got to know about it. Now, why didn’t anyone else think about it, one could argue that he was educated, he was a lawyer, but that argument does not hold any water because there were other very educated (london educated!!!) people in the Indian National Congress, why couldn’t one of them come up with a similar idea. The reason is that Gandhi was lateral thinker, he knew and saw things differently, ‘India’s salt belongs to Indians’ he said.

Let me give another example, Gandhi started the non-cooperation and civil disobedience movement. Again, what a master stroke, The reason for colonialism was to find raw material and markets for products manufactured in Europe. So, Gandhi comes up with another ingeneous idea, ‘We won’t buy your goods’, ‘We will not pay taxes’. What can the British do? They can’t simply beat up or imprison 300 milion people, there are only around 100,000 of them, there is no space in the jails, how will they feed the prisoners? I know of no time in history before this that some one had come up with an idea like this. For the first time in history someone had used non-violence & non-cooperation to achieve his goals. It was almost like the way Newton came up with the laws of motion which were a completely new way of looking at the phsical world almost completely opposite to the earlier understanding of the physical world. A similar thing happened when almost 2 centuries later Einstien presented his theory of relativity.

I come back to the point i made earlier, ‘Gandhigiri is not possible without Gandhi.’ You need lateral thinking, you need a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and you need unconventional means to solve it. It took Gandhi 20 years to understand the problem he was trying to solve. He traveled through the whole of India to know India. At Champaran he used British law to expose the tyranny of the British. Gandhiji’s ideas were completely new, original and radical. The British simply had no answer to these. Just as Gandhi came up with these ideas, we need to come up with similar creative ideas to solve the problems we face in India, or for that matter the world, in these modern times. Therefore i say again ‘Gandhigiri is not possible without Gandhi’.