Mahatma Gandhi: A Journey From Fear to Freedom and Nonviolence
Mahatma Gandhi, through his legacy of nonviolence and experimentation, offers timeless lessons on harmony, empathy, and navigating global challenges of inequality and violence.
Mahatma Gandhi did not leave a tome of theory but a model of experimentation that is available to us, thus placing this dialectical drama between violence and nonviolence beyond the realm of myth and into history. The time is opportune to understand his process before he passes on to the pantheon; he still is a man with his fallacies and pitfalls, trying to scale the raging tsunamis of emotions with his reason and benevolence.
Mahatma Gandhi knew that ‘History is a record of discord and not harmony,’ and that is what he was creating—harmony within and without. He realised that confrontation between emotional urges and will is a waste of energy, and the war between the conscious and unconscious can be won only by incessantly modulating the latter to the tune of the will. He experimented at the micro but expanded to the macro, from the individual to the cosmic. Traditional yet radical, ascetic yet worldly, political yet saintly, Gandhi walked many such tightropes in his life simultaneously, but his continuous struggle was in the duel between violence and nonviolence—even his struggle with sexuality was subsumed in it.