Once on my way to New Delhi, I asked a farmer, what he thinks about the great leaders of India, like Gandhi? What have they given to nation? He replied, “ HOLIDAYS”
This seems to be an honest answer of a person who had been watching the different cycles of politics and social changes in India.
Today is the birthday of the great leader of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, widely known as Mahatma Gandhi. Rajghat is going to be packed from sunrise to the sunset with the visitors across the nation. Widely known to merely unknown leaders would come to pay their homage to the great leader. Various program are getting organized each year on his birthday, Governmental and non governmental too. Giving a special scheme to other mundane activity, yes-mundane activities start on this day.
Yes I call them mundane because they do not seem to go anywhere. Could anyone recall what has happened to Indira Awas yojana (Indira house planning), which is one of them?
Gandhi is literally forgotten in India and how he has been forgotten is very interesting. In 61 years Gandhi and his life only became a myth, only a myth, nothing more. And myths are okay to narrate a story but hard to bring in practice.
Sometime I really wonder if it has been done purposely or if it has just happened. Whatever is there but the myth only serves a purpose now which is holiday and picnics for common man.
Policies, which could have served a notion with Gandhian ideas, are not any more even interesting to talk about. Leaders do not give any attention to the ideals of this man to whom we call Father of nation. He must be one of the most unlucky father ever, whose children we; do not commit him more then having his name on our country and making him not less then a legend.
It is very easy to preach someone as legend and this is India’s specialty. As soon as someone seems to be a real mover andshaker, we made him or still making him as a legend. Then it is very easy to bypass him. Legends only stay in books and stories not in real life.
This is one of the cruelest joke with Gandhi, where a practical man was made a legend just after few years of his death. In his country, a man who practically did everything what he taught is now not more then a cliché of bookshelves. The idea ofIndia which once came with Gandhi is dying each and every day but the legend is becoming bigger then ever.
Gandhi has no value if he is been not practiced in the policies of this nation. Gandhi is not a person only, he is an Idea and if the idea of Gandhi cannot be used, it is better for a nation to get rid of him. For me Gandhi is a thought, a philosophy more then a man. If Philosophy could be forgotten and if the idea could not be used what is the use of Gandhi? For me Gandhi could live only in our ideas, he could live only in our tendencies and the approach what we take to build this nation
Few days back the columnist of New York Times Akash Kapur wrote, “Gandhi famously said that the soul of India was to befound in its villages. The center of gravity has shifted. Indian cities, charged with the hopes and aspirations and frustrations of millions of rural migrants, have become crucibles of the modern nation. It is in the cities — in the big metropolises like Mumbai and Bangalore, but also in the thousands of smaller towns that have swollen over the last couple of decades — that the future of India is being shaped.( Birth pangs of a brass new country)”
There is very little work that has been done for education in the villages’ especially vocational education, which could have brought skills in growing village population. Agriculture development is partial and does not reach to the mass of farming society, eventually leading to the migration of Agricultural labour.
Gandhi famously said, India’s soul lives in its villages, but now I think soul is not any more, remain only dead body, which isdecorated and painted with the money which could have gone to the Villages for their development.
Self-reliance and empowerment was one of the ideal dream of Gandhi, one can see by the movement of CHARKHA what he held till his last breadth. Indian villages needed only empowerment and little help to reach there but it did not come and now the people those who have lived in villages and served their purpose being there come to the cities to work in industries as unskilled labour or in construction job. Eventually cities are full with emigrants with fewer infrastructures. As Akash Kapur said, Indian cities are not any more livable.
Livelihood was the focus of Gandhian dream not only for some special classes but for all the citizens. But now India is known by only few Ambanis and millions are still living below poverty line. Gandhi said in one his first meeting when he spoke to the common man under the congress banner: India’s freedom could only be achieved if the struggle of freedom reaches to millions those who are common man of this country. He even went beyond and said the fight of struggle is not only of lawyers of Mumbai and Delhi but it has to be by each and every class of society.
Now only Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai or few other cities represent India. I wonder where is Gandhi here in this country.
Gandhi was not only a political leader; he was leader of society too. Gandhi not only took the job to clean the colonist but the country too. So many years after his departure, if one more leader had taken this job, this country would have been more civil and clean.
I wonder again and again what it meant to be in a country where Gandhi is the father of nation and we celebrate his birthday with full day holiday. I wonder if this is what Gandhi would have liked? The person who worked each and every day till his last breadth never taking any holidays, his birthday have became a holiday. It is the joke of a nation or a real salute to the power of this man? I do not know, I just know that I would love one day more work to build this country and on 2nd October specially, when a man of hard work was born.
- In honor of the great leader Mahatma Gandhi