He is thus the reason behind some of the costliest pens in the world and also smiles toothless to provide an intellectual hue to an overtly capitalistic venture of selling world class music players. For us, Gandhi with brand Apple. Definitely cool.
All this is fine,i guess. The world has changed, villages cannot be left to be self sufficient anymore, Mac D's Chicken Nudggets come with Baskin and Robbins ice-creams these days and khadi is fashion. As time goes on we shall find different interpretations of his ideology, those that would nod along with our contemporary necessities. Ahimsa and Satyagraha would be discussed about so much, written as answers at schools and colleges and competitive examinations so often, taught about their relevance to public servants in countries all over the world, debated over the muliple uses that they could be put to, that on some bright sunny day Japan might just think of introducing two vigilante robots by those names! Be it any way, M.K.Gandhi will not die for quite some time in the future.
Gandhiji lives on in such versatile ranks because we need a touchstone of genuine willpower and honesty in our lives. Everybody wants a share of the Gandhi pie because it serves as a reminder to how short we fall from what we want to be. But it so happens that some treat it as a means and some as ends. Some like to talk about him and go to sleep satisfied with the feeling that they had said something right. More often than not they are the ones who are most forceful in their arguments. And some strive hard to live upto the standards to which they have moulded Gandhiji's creed in order to create a greater perspective in their own lives. Who else is a greater example than the controversial Subhas Chandra Bose! He might have believed in a completely different truth and his ideals might have been bred somewhere else but he still did remain resolute to his kind of Satyagraha. Let us save our judgements of right and wrong here. Perhaps only Gandhiji could have done complete justice to his ideals, though he, too, is sometimes found to adjust his canons to afford different bargains at different times.
So when Barkha Dutt asks us to plant trees to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti next year, I would feel really happy to see her leading us from the front. After all, Satyagraha, by its roots, would mean honesty to what one's conscience accords.
The faith of Gandhiji in Satyagraha and Ahimsa stems from the ancient Upanishads which have copious volumes of philosophical discourse on the subjects. Some Gandhi-bashers would not hesitate to point it out. True enough, they were not his inventions. But what Gandhiji did was that he gave a definite shape to an apparently amorphous abstraction, a humble reference for the vast mutitude and an access to a bundle of sparingly surmountable knowledge. Gandhiji simplified the Upanishads for the common people. He too,actually, modified the source to serve general needs and immediate exigencies.
That is one reason why he lives on; to provide perspectives of belief to all and sundry.
