Of Gandhi, and dustballs - II

Last night, on the way back from office, I was having this chance conversation with my fellow passenger, which veered from Rang De Basanti to Bhagat Singh to Gandhi. And the lady happened to remark that she did not agree with Gandhi, or Nehru, or other leaders of their ilk. I confessed to my admiration for Gandhi, to which her immediate reaction was (suitably impressed, I think) - "you are a Gandhian?" I immediately denied any such claims to greatness (at least thats the way I perceive it), but it also set me thinking - and hence this piece. :-)

Being a Gandhian is not just a matter of wearing Gandhi topi. As an aside, I wonder why the cap is called Gandhi topi at all. Gandhi himself was a minimalist when it came to clothing (and also food and shelter, for that matter). Even if being a Gandhian was that simple, I wouldn't don the cap, so to speak - for two reasons. One, it is no longer fashionable, even among politicians, and two, more importantly, this is the performance appraisal time where I work, and I don't want to give my boss more reasons to regret his recruitment strategies. :-) In any case, to get back to the main issue, I simply do not have the courage - physical, moral, spiritual - or the conviction, or the dedication, or the empathy, or....basically I don't have what it takes to be a Gandhian. Even Gandhi probably was not always a Gandhian - as the sorry episode over Netaji Bose's election as Congress President reflects. Which, of course, just emphasizes my point in the previous post, that Gandhi was also a human being.

Was Gandhi really responsible for our freedom? I was quite amazed when I went through a fairly decent biography of his (I think by Robert Payne, but need to cross-check), and found that post his return to India, he was involved in so many causes which had tenuous link with our freedom struggle. Yet, what all of them had in common was that it related to the masses. And may be that is what freedom meant to Gandhi - power to the masses. The oppressors might be the British government, or the mill owners of Ahmedabad, or the village panchayat that would not allow the untouchables to draw water from the village well. But the struggle was always for the downtrodden. To that extent, Gandhi's fight for freedom was about freedom from injustice - not just from the British. At least that is my interpretation.

In fact, it can be argued (and not frivolously) that Hitler (him of the Nazi fame) probably did as much for India's freedom as any Indian leader - and I am not referring to his aid to Netaji (which wasn't really material). If Hitler had not done to the British Empire what Toyota has done to General Motors (i.e. make it bankrupt - of course, through vastly different means), it is questionable whether the English would have left us in 1947 just because we told them to "Quit India" in 1942. This is not to trivialize the sacrifices of freedom fighters at all, but it just brings me to one of my pet themes - correlation does not imply causation. Or, a lot of effects can probably be explained by the theory "at the right place at the right time." Would strongly recommend the book "Fooled by Randomness" in case any reader is interested in following up on these thoughts.

There are times when I wonder whether we got the freedom too early. If the real idea of freedom is freedom from oppression, then for the vast majority of Indians even today, we have probably exchanged one set of oppressors for another. This is unlikely to strike a note with most of the readers, and indeed myself, because of the India we inhabit - IT, BPO, economic growth, Sensex etc. But is that the real India? Of course, the fact that I can write all this without the fear of censorship from the likes of Yahoo, MS and Google (all under the patronizing glance of the Chinese government) is itself a testament to our freedom. But what does freedom mean to a pavement hawker, to a slum dweller, to the farmers in AP and Vidarbha? Would they trade freedom for assurance of food? Wouldn't I?

P.S. As I was leaving for work, I spotted two of them, engaged in a conspiratorial whisper, just behind the front-left bed-post. The battle continues between me and the dustballs. Tomorrow is another day! :-)