Bande mein Tha dum!!

I know its not fashionable to say so nowadays. But I am a big fan of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And this post is going to be an unabashed, uninhibited eulogy of the fellow. So people who are desperate to be objective and don’t like to give him a demi god status can close their eyes and let this one go.

I guess its very easy to be objective about a person when we have not lived in the times that he had. It is very difficult to feel what the people felt at that time for him. Movies and books try to cross this objectivity divide. But even they fail because the ‘intellectuals’ would prefer to get into the technical aspect of film making and book writing rather than experience those moments by getting themselves involved in it.

Maybe that was why our generation needed a “Munnabhai” to try and explain what Gandhi had done for humanity because it never claimed to be a kind of movie which was supposed to cater to the ‘intellectuals’ (read critics).

I have at different points of time in my life had discussions with my friends about Gandhi and his ideology and have been surprised that some people manage to find a reason to hate him. I always thought this was more a product of the cynicism of the times or the yearning of some people to be contrarian for the sake of it. Or maybe I am too bull headed to appreciate the fact that people can have opinions which are not what is generally accepted.

One action of his which always stands out is the one where he declares the Non Cooperative movement off after the Chauri Chaura incident. There are a number of ways in which you can look at it –

1.)You can call it the act of a miffed old man when he realizes that people are not following his dictats

2.)Or the one of a person who is playing to the gallery and wants all the attention to be directed on him all the time

3.)Or the act of a person who is writing an autobiography and is desperately short of content.

I would rather take it as the act of a person who believed in his idea; an idea which was working beautifully till that point of time. If it was all about showmanship he would have never taken the decision, simply because of the fact that there was more chance of him losing supporters because of this decision than gaining.

You may have differences of opinion on how he went about it but there is no way you can question the intent or attribute any other motive to it.

Unfortunately, people like Gandhi are always under the scanner and people enjoy attributing a negative motive to whatever they do. So if he mentions that he used to visit brothels when he was in South Africa (“My experiments with truth”), the immediate reaction from skeptics would be that the Buddha is showing off by trying to be too self righteous. And if he had not mentioned it in the autobiography and people came to know of it through an Aaj Tak spy cam, all hell will break loose of course.

Maybe it is difficult to accept the fact that people can so passionately believe in an idea that they don’t need to put up a face in public which is not their own. Or maybe our own mediocrity dissuades us from believing the fact that there can be people who do not have a personal agenda to everything they do.

As far as I am concerned, surely “Bande mein tha dum”.

Hmmmmppphhh.